He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama’s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.

Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the « greed » of the insurance companies.

The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book « Liberal Fascism » cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as their own during the 1920s.

Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.

It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.

What socialism, fascism and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.

The left’s vision is not only a vision of the world, but also a vision of themselves, as superior beings pursuing superior ends. In the United States, however, this vision conflicts with a Constitution that begins, « We the People … »

That is why the left has for more than a century been trying to get the Constitution’s limitations on government loosened or evaded by judges’ new interpretations, based on notions of « a living Constitution » that will take decisions out of the hands of « We the People, » and transfer those decisions to our betters.

The self-flattery of the vision of the left also gives its true believers a huge ego stake in that vision, which means that mere facts are unlikely to make them reconsider, regardless of what evidence piles up against the vision of the left, and regardless of its disastrous consequences.

Only our own awareness of the huge stakes involved can save us from the rampaging presumptions of our betters, whether they are called socialists or fascists. So long as we buy their heady rhetoric, we are selling our birthright of freedom.

Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama is not exactly Jefferson-Adams or Lincoln-Douglas. No Harry Truman or Bill Clinton here, let alone FDR or Reagan. Indeed, it’s arguable that neither party is fielding its strongest candidate. Hillary Clinton would run far better than Obama. True, her secretaryship of state may not remotely qualify as Kissingerian or Achesonian, but she’s not Obama. She carries none of his economic baggage. She’s unsullied by the past 31 / 2 years.

Similarly, the Republican bench had several candidates stronger than Romney, but they chose not to run. Indeed, one measure of the weakness of the two finalists is this: The more each disappears from view, the better he fares. Obama prospered when he was below radar during the Republican primaries. Now that they’re over and he’s back out front, his fortunes have receded.

He is constantly on the campaign trail. His frantic fundraising — 160 events to date — alternates with swing-state rallies where the long-gone charisma of 2008 has been replaced by systematic special-interest pandering, from cut-rate loans for indentured students to free contraceptives for women (the denial of which constitutes a “war” on same).

Then came the rush of bad news: terrible May unemployment numbers, a crushing Democratic defeat in Wisconsin, and that curious revolt of the surrogates, as Bill Clinton, Deval Patrick and Cory Booker — all dispatched to promote Obama — ended up contradicting, undermining or deploring Obama’s anti-business attacks on Romney.

Obama’s instinctive response? Get back out on the air. Call an impromptu Friday news conference. And proceed to commit the gaffe of the year: “The private sector is doing fine.”

This didn’t just expose Obama to precisely the out-of-touchness charge he is trying to hang on Romney. It betrayed his core political philosophy. Obama was trying to attribute high unemployment to a paucity of government workers and to suggest that the solution was to pad the public rolls (with borrowed Chinese money). In doing so, though, he fatally undid his many previous protestations of being a fiscally prudent government cutter. (Hence his repeated, and widely discredited, boast of the lowest spending growth since Eisenhower.)

He thus positioned himself as, once again, the big-government liberal of 2009, convinced that what the ailing economy needs is yet another bout of government expansion. A serious political misstep, considering the fate of the last stimulus: the weakest recovery since the Great Depression, with private-sector growth a minuscule 1.2 percent.

But that’s not the end of the tribulations that provoked a front-page Washington Post story beginning: “Is it time for Democrats to panic”? The sleeper issue is the cascade of White House leaks that have exposed significant details of the cyberattacks on Iran, the drone war against al-Qaeda, the double-agent in Yemen, and the Osama bin Laden raid and its aftermath.

This is not leak-business as usual. “I have never seen it worse,” said Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, 11 years on the Intelligence Committee. These revelations, clearly meant to make Obama look the heroic warrior, could prove highly toxic if current investigations bear out Sen. John McCain’s charges of leaks tolerated, if not encouraged, by a campaigning president placing his own image above the nation’s security. After all, Feinstein herself stated that these exposures were endangering American lives, weakening U.S. security and poisoning relations with other intelligence services.

Quite an indictment. Where it goes, no one knows. Much will hinge on whether Eric Holder’s Justice Department will stifle the investigation he has now handed over to two in-house prosecutors. And whether Republicans and principled Democrats will insist on a genuinely independent inquiry.

Nonetheless, there is nothing inexorable about the current Obama slide. The race remains 50-50. Republican demoralization after a primary campaign that blew the political equivalent of a seven-run lead has now given way to Democratic demoralization at the squandering of their subsequent ­post-primary advantage.

What remains is a solid, stolid, gaffe-prone challenger for whom conservatism is a second language vs. an incumbent with a record he cannot run on and signature policies — Obamacare, the stimulus, cap-and-trade — he hardly dare mention.

A quite dispiriting spectacle. And more than a bit confusing. Why, just this week the estimable Jeb Bush averred that the Republican Party had become so rigidly right-wing that today it couldn’t even nominate Ronald Reagan.

Huh? It’s about to nominate Mitt Romney, who lives a good 14 nautical miles to the left of Ronald Reagan.

Goodness. Four more months of this campaign and we will all be unhinged.

Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas. The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes. Mohammed al-Ahmadi (avocat d’une ONG yéménite)

On September 30, 2011, a drone flying over Yemen set a new precedent. Without a trial or any public court proceeding, the United States government killed two American citizens, Anwar Al Awlaki and Samir Khan. The target of the attack was Awlaki, a New Mexico-born Yemeni-American whose charismatic preaching inspired terrorist attacks around the world, including the 2009 killing of 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas. Civil liberties groups argued that a dangerous new threshold had been crossed. For the first time in American history, the United States had executed two of its citizens without trial. The Obama Administration cited a secret Justice Department memorandum as justification for the attack. Its authors contended that Awlaki’s killing was legal due to his role in attacks on the United States and his presence in an area where American forces could not easily capture him.David Rohde

After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians. (…) It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness. (…) It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term. Mr. Blair (ancien directeur du renseignement)

A very strange story, that 6,000-word front-page New York Times piece on how, every Tuesday, Barack Obama shuffles “baseball cards” with the pictures and bios of suspected terrorists from around the world and chooses who shall die by drone strike. He even reserves for himself the decision of whether to proceed when the probability of killing family members or bystanders is significant.

The article could have been titled “Barack Obama: Drone Warrior.” Great detail on how Obama personally runs the assassination campaign. On-the-record quotes from the highest officials. This was no leak. This was a White House press release.

Why? To portray Obama as tough guy. And why now? Because in crisis after recent crisis, Obama has looked particularly weak: standing helplessly by as thousands are massacred in Syria; being played by Iran in nuclear negotiations, now reeling with the collapse of the latest round in Baghdad; being treated with contempt by Vladimir Putin, who blocks any action on Syria or Iran and adds personal insult by standing up Obama at the latter’s G-8 and NATO summits.

The Obama camp thought that any political problem with foreign policy would be cured by the Osama bin Laden operation. But the administration’s attempt to politically exploit the raid’s one-year anniversary backfired, earning ridicule and condemnation for its crude appropriation of the heroic acts of others.

A campaign ad had Bill Clinton praising Obama for the courage of ordering the raid because, had it failed and Americans been killed, “the downside would have been horrible for him. “ Outraged vets released a response ad, pointing out that it would have been considerably more horrible for the dead SEALs.

That ad also highlighted the many self-references Obama made in announcing the bin Laden raid: “I can report . . . I directed . . . I met repeatedly . . . I determined . . . at my direction . . . I, as commander in chief,” etc. ad nauseam. (Eisenhower’s announcement of the D-Day invasion made not a single mention of his role, whereas the alternate statement he’d prepared had the landing been repulsed was entirely about it being his failure.)

Obama only compounded the self-aggrandizement problem when he spoke a week later about the military “fighting on my behalf.”

The Osama-slayer card having been vastly overplayed, what to do? A new card: Obama, drone warrior, steely and solitary, delivering death with cool dispatch to the rest of the al-Qaeda depth chart.

So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. But because of the moral incoherence of Obama’s war on terror, there are practically no captures anymore. What would be the point? There’s nowhere for the CIA to interrogate. And what would they learn even if they did, Obama having decreed a new regime of kid-gloves, name-rank-and-serial-number interrogation?

This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily (and unsuccessfully, there being — surprise! — no plausible alternative) to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds.

You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed. We do kill terror operatives, an important part of the war on terror, but we gratuitously forfeit potentially life-saving intelligence.

But that will cost us later. For now, we are to bask in the moral seriousness and cool purpose of our drone warrior president.

Pity the poor Obama administration leakers. They impart their much-cherished secrets to make their man look good and then, at the first chirp of criticism, are ordered to confess their (possible) crimes by the very same president they were seeking to please. In this, they are a bit like the male praying mantis. He does as asked, and then the female bites his head off.

What is remarkable about the recent leaks is the coincidence — it can only be that — that they all made the president look good, heroic, decisive, strong and even a touch cruel; born, as the birthers long suspected, not in Hawaii — but possibly on the lost planet Krypton. The leak that displayed all these Obamian attributes was the one that said the president personally approves the assassinations of terrorists abroad. He gives his okay, and the bad guys are dispatched via missiles from drones.

The New York Times, which broke this particular story, said it had interviewed “three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers,” which suggests the sort of mass law-breaking not seen since Richard Nixon took out after commies, liberals, conservationists, antiwar protesters, Jews and, of course, leakers. The two U.S. attorneys assigned to finding the leakers may have to use the facilities at Guantanamo, which, as luck would have it, are somehow still open. Of course, the chances of a successful prosecution are slim, leak cases being hard to prove. Journalists, unlike the mob, still adhere to the Mafia code of silence, omertà. We are, at heart, traditionalists.

All administrations leak what they want when they want. Occasionally, some killjoy screams something about national security, but the republic somehow survives and the secret is usually only a secret to the American people, not to the enemy. This is undoubtedly the case with the recent disclosure regarding the use of a computer worm to wreak havoc with the Iranian nuclear program. The Iranians were onto it.

The leak that troubles me concerns the killing of suspected or actual terrorists. The triumphalist tone of the leaks — the Tarzan-like chest-beating of various leakers — not only is in poor taste but also shreds a long-standing convention that, in these matters, the president has deniability. The president of the United States is not the Godfather.

Of course, we have always known that the president, as commander in chief and all of that, is where the proverbial buck stops. But for the longest time, a polite fiction distanced the president from what, after all, is murder, and it helped somewhat in protecting him. Deniability is always a fiction, but it provides some space between the president and his orders, and does not plaster the presidential face on an act of extreme — and possibly illegal — violence. Presidents need protection from retaliation — not just in office, but for the rest of their lives. After all, the poor man’s drone is the suicide bomber.

The present and former government officials who leaked to the Times as well as to Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman are forgiven if they thought they were doing the boss’ bidding. After all, the president was serenely mum when the stories first hit. The White House did not react until some pesky Republicans, the reliably outraged John McCain in particular, yelled bloody murder. The leakers had to have noted that a torrent of leaks followed the killing of Osama bin Laden, with Obama characterized as just this side of personally dispatching the man with a butter knife. The Times’ David Sanger reports that the bragging got to the point that then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates told national security adviser Tom Donilon to “shut the [expletive] up.” Pakistan, it turns out, did not want its nose rubbed in its failure to notice bin Laden living in Abbottabad — or, for that matter, the SEALs coming to get him.

Killing is a serious matter. The death of an American citizen (Anwar al-Awlaki) is deeply troubling (the government asked the government if it was legal, and the government said it was). For this as well as other assassinations, there could be blowback.

Assassination by drone has its charms — it has severely degraded al-Qaeda — and war, after all, is war. But I wonder if those presidents who knew war — a Truman, an Eisenhower, a Kennedy — would themselves boast about killing or let others do it for them. The leakers set out to blow a mighty trumpet for Obama. It came out, however, like a shrill penny whistle.

WASHINGTON — This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.

President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan — have also tested both men’s commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.

William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.

“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”

‘Maintain My Options’

A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantánamo Bay would be closed.

What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.

It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.’s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes.

The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas “black sites” where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects.

“The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business,” Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that.

Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of “detention facility” was inserted, excluding places used to hold people “on a short-term, transitory basis.” Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.

“Pragmatism over ideology,” his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.

Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obama’s advisers had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantánamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.

Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released, it said. Some would be prosecuted — if “feasible” — in criminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama had criticized, were not mentioned — and thus not ruled out.

As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release? Their “disposition” would be handled by “lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

But a year later, with Congress trying to force him to try all terrorism suspects using revamped military commissions, he deployed his legal skills differently — to preserve trials in civilian courts.

It was shortly after Dec. 25, 2009, following a close call in which a Qaeda-trained operative named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had boarded a Detroit-bound airliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear.

Mr. Obama was taking a drubbing from Republicans over the government’s decision to read the suspect his rights, a prerequisite for bringing criminal charges against him in civilian court.

The president “seems to think that if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war,” former Vice President Dick Cheney charged.

Sensing vulnerability on both a practical and political level, the president summoned his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to the White House.

F.B.I. agents had questioned Mr. Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes and gained valuable intelligence before giving him the warning. They had relied on a 1984 case called New York v. Quarles, in which the Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a suspect in response to urgent public safety questions — the case involved the location of a gun — could be introduced into evidence even if the suspect had not been advised of the right to remain silent.

Mr. Obama, who Mr. Holder said misses the legal profession, got into a colloquy with the attorney general. How far, he asked, could Quarles be stretched? Mr. Holder felt that in terrorism cases, the court would allow indefinite questioning on a fairly broad range of subjects.

Satisfied with the edgy new interpretation, Mr. Obama gave his blessing, Mr. Holder recalled.

“Barack Obama believes in options: ‘Maintain my options,’ “ said Jeh C. Johnson, a campaign adviser and now general counsel of the Defense Department.

‘They Must All Be Militants’

That same mind-set would be brought to bear as the president intensified what would become a withering campaign to use unmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists.

Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.

In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.

The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush.

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.

But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

‘A No-Brainer’

About four months into his presidency, as Republicans accused him of reckless naïveté on terrorism, Mr. Obama quickly pulled together a speech defending his policies. Standing before the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantánamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.

But it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obama knew it. Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantánamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism.

Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison.

“We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general.

General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed that closing the prison was “a no-brainer — the United States will look good around the world.” The trouble was, he added, “nobody asked, ‘O.K., let’s assume it’s a good idea, how are you going to do this?’ “

It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.”

In fact, both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the attorney general, Mr. Holder, had warned that the plan to close the Guantánamo prison was in peril, and they volunteered to fight for it on Capitol Hill, according to officials. But with Mr. Obama’s backing, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reform had to go first.

When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantánamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down.

That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantánamo, the same administration official said. “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy,” he said. “That’s not what happened. It’s like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guy’s eye.”

The Use of Force

It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges. “If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator?” Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”

But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.

Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”

In fact, in a 2007 campaign speech in which he vowed to pull the United States out of Iraq and refocus on Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama had trumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan — even if Pakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including Mitt Romney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced on what they considered a greenhorn’s campaign bluster. (Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama had become “Dr. Strangelove.”)

In office, however, Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan.

Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead.

Some critics of the drone strategy still vilify Mr. Brennan, suggesting that he is the C.I.A.’s agent in the White House, steering Mr. Obama to a targeted killing strategy. But in office, Mr. Brennan has surprised many former detractors by speaking forcefully for closing Guantánamo and respecting civil liberties.

Harold H. Koh, for instance, as dean of Yale Law School was a leading liberal critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. But since becoming the State Department’s top lawyer, Mr. Koh said, he has found in Mr. Brennan a principled ally.

“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

The president values Mr. Brennan’s experience in assessing intelligence, from his own agency or others, and for the sobriety with which he approaches lethal operations, other aides say.

“The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”

Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.

“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”

Mr. Obama’s aides deny such a policy, arguing that capture is often impossible in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and that many terrorist suspects are in foreign prisons because of American tips. Still, senior officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon acknowledge that they worry about the public perception.

“We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy,” said Mr. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief lawyer.

Trade-Offs

The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.

One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.

The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.

Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.

“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”

But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.

The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25, stiffened the president’s resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of a series of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam.

Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry. His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder. “He’ll inject the phrase, ‘I just want to make sure you understand that.’ “ And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he was simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures.

When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that the attack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novice bomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airport security, Mr. Obama cut them short.

“Well, he could have gotten it right and we’d all be sitting here with an airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people,” he said, according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call to imagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. In characteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official to explain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it.

“After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States,” said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Even John Brennan, someone who was already a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the straps on his rucksack after that.”

David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.

In the most dramatic possible way, the Fort Hood shootings in November and the attempted Christmas Day bombing had shown the new danger from Yemen. Mr. Obama, who had rejected the Bush-era concept of a global war on terrorism and had promised to narrow the American focus to Al Qaeda’s core, suddenly found himself directing strikes in another complicated Muslim country.

The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones described as an “embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar with.”

It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.

The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said, and once again they tried to impose some discipline.

In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Now, in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obama overruled military and intelligence commanders who were pushing to use signature strikes there as well.

“We are not going to war with Yemen,” he admonished in one meeting, according to participants.

His guidance was formalized in a memo by General Jones, who called it a “governor, if you will, on the throttle,” intended to remind everyone that “one should not assume that it’s just O.K. to do these things because we spot a bad guy somewhere in the world.”

Mr. Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped across it. Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Spring unrest, the Qaeda affiliate was seizing territory.

Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency.

The Ultimate Test

On that front, perhaps no case would test Mr. Obama’s principles as starkly as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and Qaeda propagandist hiding in Yemen, who had recently risen to prominence and had taunted the president by name in some of his online screeds.

The president “was very interested in obviously trying to understand how a guy like Awlaki developed,” said General Jones. The cleric’s fiery sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings at Fort Hood. Then he had gone “operational,” plotting with Mr. Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after the airliner was over the United States.

That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.

If the president had qualms about this momentous step, aides said he did not share them. Mr. Obama focused instead on the weight of the evidence showing that the cleric had joined the enemy and was plotting more terrorist attacks.

“This is an easy one,” Mr. Daley recalled him saying, though the president warned that in future cases, the evidence might well not be so clear.

In the wake of Mr. Awlaki’s death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department’s legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.

This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret.

“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel.

Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.

“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”

Tactics Over Strategy

In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, aimed at resetting relations with the Muslim world, Mr. Obama had spoken eloquently of his childhood years in Indonesia, hearing the call to prayer “at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”

“The United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” he declared.

But in the months that followed, some officials felt the urgency of counterterrorism strikes was crowding out consideration of a broader strategy against radicalization. Though Mrs. Clinton strongly supported the strikes, she complained to colleagues about the drones-only approach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focus exclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes.

At their weekly lunch, Mrs. Clinton told the president she thought there should be more attention paid to the root causes of radicalization, and Mr. Obama agreed. But it was September 2011 before he issued an executive order setting up a sophisticated, interagency war room at the State Department to counter the jihadi narrative on an hour-by-hour basis, posting messages and video online and providing talking points to embassies.

Mr. Obama was heartened, aides say, by a letter discovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It complained that the American president had undermined Al Qaeda’s support by repeatedly declaring that the United States was at war not with Islam, but with the terrorist network. “We must be doing a good job,” Mr. Obama told his secretary of state.

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced. John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obama’s liberal reputation and “softer packaging” have protected him. “After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians,” said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes.

By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslim civilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.

His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.

Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.

Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

But Mr. Blair’s dissent puts him in a small minority of security experts. Mr. Obama’s record has eroded the political perception that Democrats are weak on national security. No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney.

Aides say that Mr. Obama’s choices, though, are not surprising. The president’s reliance on strikes, said Mr. Leiter, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, “is far from a lurid fascination with covert action and special forces. It’s much more practical. He’s the president. He faces a post-Abdulmutallab situation, where he’s being told people might attack the United States tomorrow.”

“You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “Those laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.”

The recent New York Times article on Obama’s use of drones has reverberated across the internet. The fractured lives and fractured diplomacy these attacks have left in their wake has become the subject of articles, blogs and television segments. While drone warfare is nothing new, the article revealed that the technology has become increasingly advanced and drones are now the go-to weapon for Obama’s ‘War on Terror’. Indeed, this lurch towards more hawkish right-wing policiess has some suggesting that the President has become “George W. Bush on steroids”. I believe Obama’s drone strategy is a betrayal of all who supported him. In turn, the silence of all those who voted for “hope” and “change” is worrying; it suggests that the US liberal electorate would rather support Obama, who they perceive as a lesser political evil than his Republican adversaries, than actually questioning the political hypocrisy his foreign policy entails.

The New York Times’ article is disturbing because it explains how Obama has instituted a command structure in which he authorises each drone strike. The now infamous ‘Kill list’ demonstrates Obama’s dramatic political shift. Indeed, he has adopted policies that, as Jack Goldsmith (Bush’s Assistant Attorney General) highlighted in 2009, have “copied most of the Bush programme” and have even “expanded some of it”.

It is understandable that some are finding it hard to reconcile this ‘Call of Duty’ strategy with the poetic election campaigner of 2008. Prior to being elected, Obama was consistently wary of how the ‘War on Terror’ was being conducted. He notably proclaimed in a 2002 speech : “What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war”. And though he did take cover by stating that he does not oppose all forms of war, arguably engaging in drone warfare is “dumb” and “rash”.

The fallout from Obama’s warfaring is especially embarrassing in the light of his Nobel Peace Prize award in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”. By awarding the honour to Obama, more on the basis of his anticipated achievements than actual evidence, an uncomfortable contradiction has developed: here is a man who is noted for talking peace while becoming ever more embroiled in the brutality of war.

Obama’s use of drones is only one element in his transformation from liberal to quasi-conservative. And there are commentators who believe he has always been a pragmatist and that his political record has shown him to be less idealistic than his rhetoric suggests. But even for the less cynically inclined, Obama’s continuation and extension of neo-conservative policy should be a numbing disappointment for liberals.

No doubt, US government officials will argue that Obama is engaging in the reality of modern warfare and that drones are a safer way of executing terrorists than employing ground troops. White House Counter Terrorism advisor John Brennan stated that civilian causalities are “exceedingly rare”. Well yes, they are “exceedingly rare”, but only because the CIA’s definition of a “combatant” is so broad that it effectively means anyone killed in a drone strike, as long as they are “military-age males” can be classified as a “combatant”. Such callousness damns not only those who were enamoured by Obama’s rhetoric of “hope” and “change”, but also anyone who believes civil liberties should not be eroded out of fear of the unknown.

This military policy also inadvertently undermines the US’s relations with countries crucial to its ‘War on Terror’. Diplomacy, particularly with Pakistan, has become increasingly strained following recent attacks, while Sudarsan Raghavan in The Washington Post suggested the use of drones is actually doing more damage than good to the US’s war effort.

Will such evidence against drone warfare impact on Obama’s re-election hopes? Anti-war sentiment was a large factor in catalysing the Republican Party’s electoral demise in 2008. Will it do the same for Obama? Perhaps not; Obama’s poll ratings were highest in the days following Osama bin Laden’s assassination, possibly indicating that an aggressive foreign policy is not always unwelcome. Yet a more probable explanation lies in the transitory upsurge of US patriotism following Osama bin Laden’s death. Tellingly, Obama’s poll figures quickly trailed off suggesting the latter, and indicating that a continuation of this foreign policy may not be a fast track to electoral success.

There has been a disconcerting lack of demonstrations opposing the use of drones. A few dedicated anti-war stalwarts in the Occupy movement spoke out, but they have had scant impact on public opinion. Young progressives, who were so pivotal in getting Obama elected, so fuelled by the optimism of the 2008 election campaign and so vocal in their disapproval of Bush’s war policies have all but disappeared; their voices are silent at a time when the Obama Administration is not just continuing similar policies but actually extending them. Any debate about the morality of drone warfare has not been undertaken en masse but has remained confined to academic discussions and broadsheet column inches. However, it is clear that America’s optimism has faded, and Obama’s failure to deliver on much of his inspiring rhetoric has intensified a climate of apathy. Actor Matt Damon, summed this up on CNN’s Piers Morgan Show when he stated scathingly: “I no longer hope for audacity”.

Drone strikes symbolise Obama’s transformation from a candidate who espoused change to an Imperial president very much in the mould of his predecessor. As Penn and Teller have said, the Obama Administration is “spending money America doesn’t have, to kill people they don’t know, for reasons no one understands”. His use of drone warfare is yet another test of principle for those who ever had the audacity to hope.

A stunning report in the New York Times depicted President Obama poring over the equivalent of terrorist baseball cards, deciding who on a “kill list” would be targeted for elimination by drone attack. The revelations — as well as those in Daniel Klaidman’s recent book — sparked public outrage and calls for congressional inquiry.

Yet bizarrely, the fury is targeted at the messengers, not the message. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expressed dismay that presidential aides were leaking national security information to bolster the president’s foreign policy credentials. (Shocking? Think gambling, Casablanca). Republican and Democratic senators joined in condemning the leaks. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. — AWOL in the prosecution of rampant bank fraud — roused himself to name two prosecutors to track down the leakers.

Please. Al-Qaeda knows that U.S. drones are hunting them. The Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Afghanis and others know the U.S. is behind the drones that strike suddenly from above. The only people aided by these revelations are the American people who have an overriding right and need to know.

The problem isn’t the leaks, it’s the policy. It’s the assertion of a presidential prerogative that the administration can target for death people it decides are terrorists — even American citizens — anywhere in the world, at any time, on secret evidence with no review.

It is a policy driven largely by the new technological capacity of pilotless aircraft. Drone strikes have rapidly expanded, becoming a centerpiece of the Obama strategy. Over the last three years, the Obama administration has carried out at least 239 covert drone strikes, more than five times the 44 approved under George W. Bush.

Drones are enormously seductive and widely popular. Video games made real, they are relatively cheap, risk no U.S. casualties, claim to be exactly targeted and, according to the administration, have been lethal in eliminating al-Qaeda’s operatives. As Adm. Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence for the Obama administration before being pushed out, notes, “It plays well domestically and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”

Drones are also alarming. As a recent congressional letter of inquiry notes, “They are faceless ambassadors that cause civilian deaths . . . They can generate powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment.” The drone attacks may generate as many terrorists as they dispatch. They seduce the U.S. into literally policing the world, an intrusive presence that surely will generate hostility and retribution.

Moreover, the president’s claim offends the spirit and letter of the Constitution and shreds the global laws of war. Our founders were eager to curb the prerogative of kings to wage war and foreign adventures. That is why the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war. Yet the president now claims the right to attack anywhere in the world in an apparently endless war against terrorism.

The argument, of course, is that we are at war with al-Qaeda’s terrorists — one that Congress authorized — and thus the president is free to track them down and attack them anywhere in the world, even if they are American citizens. To enforce this, the U.S. has Special Operations forces in some 60 to 75 countries and has unleashed drones in at least five.

The administration is at pains to suggest that no one is targeted for death until after extensive review, internal checks and balances and administrative “due process” of a sort. But this rationale is refuted by what we know from the administration’s own limited releases of information. Officials distinguish between “personality strikes” — which are targeted at named operatives — and “signature strikes” — which are triggered by evidence of allegedly threatening activity by unidentified persons. Not surprisingly, the latter have been notorious for the “collateral damage” — innocent civilians — who have been casualties.

Most Americans support the drones — after all they’re going after terrorists. But the administration is claiming the right to charge, try and execute an American citizen without a hearing or a trial and conviction. The Constitution, Attorney General Holder argues, “guarantees due process, not judicial process.” But once more, this tramples the entire framework of the Bill of Rights, which was devised to limit the power of the state to lock up political dissenters without an independent tribunal.

It is vital that Congress reassert its constitutional authority. In the 1952 Steel Seizure case, Justice Felix Frankfurter argued that “a systematic, unbroken, executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of Congress and never before questioned . . . may be treated as a gloss on the executive power” vested in the president by the Constitution. The practice doesn’t just become legal, it becomes part of the Constitution, and Congress cannot thereafter challenge the authority that has been ceded.

Over twenty legislators led by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) have written formally to the president asking that he explain openly “the process by which signature strikes are authorized and executed; the mechanisms used to “ensure such killings are legal;” and the mechanisms to track civilian casualties. The Congress should also insist that the Justice Department memo detailing the legal arguments relied on by the president be made public. And then Congress needs to hold a grand inquest on presidential war powers and the rights of both the Congress and American citizens.

Aden, Yemen — Across the vast, rugged terrain of southern Yemen, an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.

After recent U.S. missile strikes, mostly from unmanned aircraft, the Yemeni government and the United States have reported that the attacks killed only suspected al-Qaeda members. But civilians have also died in the attacks, said tribal leaders, victims’ relatives and human rights activists.

“These attacks are making people say, ‘We believe now that al-Qaeda is on the right side,’ ” said businessman Salim al-Barakani, adding that his two brothers — one a teacher, the other a cellphone repairman — were killed in a U.S. strike in March.

Since January, as many as 21 missile attacks have targeted suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, reflecting a sharp shift in a secret war carried out by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command that had focused on Pakistan.

But as in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where U.S. drone strikes have significantly weakened al-Qaeda’s capabilities, an unintended consequence of the attacks has been a marked radicalization of the local population.

The evidence of radicalization emerged in more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen where U.S. strikes have targeted suspected militants. They described a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network’s most active wing, al-Qaeda in the ­Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.

“The drone strikes have not helped either the United States or Yemen,” said Sultan al-Barakani, who was a top adviser to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. “Yemen is paying a heavy price, losing its sons. But the Americans are not paying the same price.”

In 2009, when President Obama was first known to have authorized a missile strike on Yemen, U.S. officials said there were no more than 300 core AQAP members. That number has grown in recent years to 700 or more, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say. In addition, hundreds of tribesmen have joined AQAP in the fight against the U.S.-backed Yemeni government.

As AQAP’s numbers and capabilities have grown, so has its reach and determination. That was reflected in a suicide bombing last week in the capital, Sanaa, that killed more than 100 people, mostly Yemeni soldiers.

On their Web sites, on their Facebook pages and in their videos, militants who had been focused on their fight against the Yemeni government now portray the war in the south as a jihad against the United States, which could attract more recruits and financing from across the Muslim world. Yemeni tribal Web sites are filled with al-Qaeda propaganda, including some that brag about killing Americans.

“Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, legal coordinator for Karama, a local human rights group. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes.”

An escalated campaign

Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, has publicly defended the use of drone strikes, arguing that their precision allows the United States to limit civilian casualties and lessen risks for U.S. military personnel. The decision to fire a missile from a drone, he said, is taken with “extraordinary care and thoughtfulness.”

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said the administration’s counter­terrorism strategy in Yemen is “guided by the view that we must do what is necessary to disrupt AQAP plots against U.S. interests” and to help the Yemeni government build up its capabilities to fight AQAP.

“While AQAP has grown in strength over the last year, many of its supporters are tribal militants or part-time supporters who collaborate with AQAP for self-serving, personal interests rather than affinity with al-Qaeda’s global ideology,” Vietor said. “The portion of hard-core, committed AQAP members is relatively small.”

The dramatic escalation in drone strikes in Yemen followed foiled plots by AQAP to bomb a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit in 2009 and to send parcel bombs via cargo planes to Chicago the following year. In April, Saudi intelligence agents helped foil an AQAP plot to plant a suicide bomber on a U.S.-bound plane.

On May 6, a U.S. drone strike killed Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda leader who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for his role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, an attack that killed 17 American sailors. The drone strike in Shabwa province also killed a second man, whom U.S. and Yemeni officials described as another al-Qaeda militant.

But according to his relatives, the man was a 19-year-old named Nasser Salim who was tending to his farm when Quso arrived in his vehicle. Quso knew Salim’s family and was greeting him when the missiles landed.

“He was torn to pieces,” said Salim’s uncle, Abu Baker Aidaroos, 30, a Yemeni soldier. “He was not part of al-Qaeda. But by America’s standards, just because he knew Fahd al-Quso, he deserved to die with him.”

Out of anger, Aidaroos said, he left his unit in Abyan province, the nexus of the fight against the militants. Today, instead of fighting al-Qaeda, he sympathizes with the group — not out of support for its ideology, he insists, but out of hatred for the United States.

‘More hostility’ toward U.S.

The U.S. strikes, tribal leaders and Yemeni officials say, are also angering powerful tribes that could prevent AQAP from gaining strength. The group has seized control of large swaths of southern Yemen in the past year, while the government has had to counter growing perceptions that it is no more than an American puppet.

“There is more hostility against America because the attacks have not stopped al-Qaeda, but rather they have expanded, and the tribes feel this is a violation of the country’s sovereignty,” said Anssaf Ali Mayo, Aden head of al-Islah, Yemen’s most influential Islamist party, which is now part of the coalition government. “There is a psychological acceptance of al-Qaeda because of the U.S. strikes.”

Quso and Salim are from the Awlak tribe, one of the most influential in southern Yemen. So was Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American preacher who was thought to be a senior AQAP leader and was killed in September by a U.S. strike. The following month, another U.S. strike killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen, generating outrage across Yemen.

Awlak tribesmen are businessmen, lawmakers and politicians. But the strikes have pushed more of them to join the militants or to provide AQAP with safe haven in their areas, said tribal leaders and Yemeni officials.

“The Americans are targeting the sons of the Awlak,” Aidaroos said. “I would fight even the devil to exact revenge for my nephew.”

In early March, U.S. missiles struck in Bayda province, 100 miles south of Sanaa, killing at least 30 suspected militants, according to Yemeni security officials. But in interviews, human rights activists and victims’ relatives said many of the dead were civilians, not fighters.

Villagers were too afraid to go to the area. Al-Qaeda militants took advantage and offered to bury the villagers’ relatives. “That made people even more grateful and appreciative of al-Qaeda,” said Barakani, the businessman. “Afterwards, al-Qaeda told the people, ‘We will take revenge on your behalf.’ ”

In asserting responsibility for last week’s bombing in Sanaa, Ansar al-Sharia — the name by which AQAP goes in southern Yemen — declared that the attack was revenge for what it called the U.S. war on its followers.

The previous week, al-Qaeda’s supreme leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a video portraying Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took office in February and vowed to fight AQAP, as an “agent” of the United States.

In some cases, U.S. strikes have forced civilians to flee their homes and have destroyed homes and farmland. Balweed Muhammed Nasser Awad, 57, said he and his family fled the city of Jaar last summer after his son, a fisherman, was killed in a U.S. strike targeting suspected al-Qaeda militants. Today, they live in a classroom in an Aden school, along with hundreds of other refugees from the conflict.

“Ansar al-Sharia had nothing to do with my son’s death. He was killed by the Americans,” Awad said. “He had nothing to do with terrorism. Why him?”

No Yemeni has forgotten the U.S. cruise missile strike in the remote tribal region of al-Majala on Dec. 17, 2009 — the Obama administration’s first known missile strike inside Yemen. The attack killed dozens, including 14 women and 21 children, and whipped up rage at the United States.

Today, the area is a haven for militants, said Abdelaziz Muhammed Hamza, head of the Revolutionary Council in Abyan province, a group that is fighting AQAP. “All the residents of the area have joined al-Qaeda,” he said.

It has been clear for years that the Obama administration believes the shadow war on terrorism gives it the power to choose targets for assassination, including Americans, without any oversight. On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed who was actually making the final decision on the biggest killings and drone strikes: President Obama himself. And that is very troubling.

Mr. Obama has demonstrated that he can be thoughtful and farsighted, but, like all occupants of the Oval Office, he is a politician, subject to the pressures of re-election. No one in that position should be able to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens or foreigners located far from a battlefield — depriving Americans of their due-process rights — without the consent of someone outside his political inner circle.

How can the world know whether the targets chosen by this president or his successors are truly dangerous terrorists and not just people with the wrong associations? (It is clear, for instance, that many of those rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks weren’t terrorists.) How can the world know whether this president or a successor truly pursued all methods short of assassination, or instead — to avoid a political charge of weakness — built up a tough-sounding list of kills?

It is too easy to say that this is a natural power of a commander in chief. The United States cannot be in a perpetual war on terror that allows lethal force against anyone, anywhere, for any perceived threat. That power is too great, and too easily abused, as those who lived through the George W. Bush administration will remember.

Mr. Obama, who campaigned against some of those abuses in 2008, should remember. But the Times article, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, depicts him as personally choosing every target, approving every major drone strike in Yemen and Somalia and the riskiest ones in Pakistan, assisted only by his own aides and a group of national security operatives. Mr. Obama relies primarily on his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan.

To his credit, Mr. Obama believes he should take moral responsibility for these decisions, and he has read the just-war theories of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The Times article points out, however, that the Defense Department is currently killing suspects in Yemen without knowing their names, using criteria that have never been made public. The administration is counting all military-age males killed by drone fire as combatants without knowing that for certain, assuming they are up to no good if they are in the area. That has allowed Mr. Brennan to claim an extraordinarily low civilian death rate that smells more of expediency than morality.

In a recent speech, Mr. Brennan said the administration chooses only those who pose a real threat, not simply because they are members of Al Qaeda, and prefers to capture suspects alive. Those assurances are hardly binding, and even under Mr. Obama, scores of suspects have been killed but only one taken into American custody. The precedents now being set will be carried on by successors who may have far lower standards. Without written guidelines, they can be freely reinterpreted.

A unilateral campaign of death is untenable. To provide real assurance, President Obama should publish clear guidelines for targeting to be carried out by nonpoliticians, making assassination truly a last resort, and allow an outside court to review the evidence before placing Americans on a kill list. And it should release the legal briefs upon which the targeted killing was based.

He was once a liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war. Now, according to revelations last week, the US president personally oversees a ‘kill list’ for drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. Then there’s the CIA renditions, increased surveillance and a crackdown on whistleblowers. No wonder Washington insiders are likening him to ‘George W Bush on steroids’

Paul Harris

The Guardian

2 June 2012

The revelation that Barack Obama keeps a ‘kill list’ of people to be targeted by drones has led to criticism from former supporters. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Amos Guiora knows all about the pitfalls of targeted assassinations, both in terms of legal process and the risk of killing the wrong people or causing civilian casualties. The University of Utah law professor spent many years in the Israel Defence Forces, including time as a legal adviser in the Gaza Strip where such killing strikes are common. He knows what it feels like when people weigh life-and-death decisions.

Yet Guiora – no dove on such matters – confessed he was « deeply concerned » about President Barack Obama’s own « kill list » of terrorists and the way they are eliminated by missiles fired from robot drones around the world. He believes US policy has not tightly defined how people get on the list, leaving it open to legal and moral problems when the order to kill leaves Obama’s desk. « He is making a decision largely devoid of external review, » Guiroa told the Observer, saying the US’s apparent methodology for deciding who is a terrorist is « loosey goosey ».

Indeed, newspaper revelations last week about the « kill list » showed the Obama administration defines a militant as any military-age male in the strike zone when its drone attacks. That has raised the hackles of many who saw Obama as somehow more sophisticated on terrorism issues than his predecessor, George W Bush. But Guiora does not view it that way. He sees Obama as the same as Bush, just much more enthusiastic when it comes to waging drone war. « If Bush did what Obama has been doing, then journalists would have been all over it, » he said.

But the « kill list » and rapidly expanded drone programme are just two of many aspects of Obama’s national security policy that seem at odds with the expectations of many supporters in 2008. Having come to office on a powerful message of breaking with Bush, Obama has in fact built on his predecessor’s national security tactics.

Obama has presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. He has launched a ferocious and unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. He has broken his promise to close down the controversial Guantánamo Bay prison and pressed on with prosecutions via secretive military tribunals, rather than civilian courts. He has preserved CIA renditions. He has tried to grab broad new powers on what defines a terrorist or a terrorist supporter and what can be done with them, often without recourse to legal process.

The sheer scope and breadth of Obama’s national security policy has stunned even fervent Bush supporters and members of the Washington DC establishment. In last week’s New York Times article that detailed the « kill list », Bush’s last CIA director, Michael Hayden, said Obama should open the process to more public scrutiny. « Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe, » he told the newspaper.

Even more pertinently, Aaron David Miller, a long-term Middle East policy adviser to both Republican and Democratic administrations, delivered a damning verdict in a recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. He wrote bluntly: « Barack Obama has become George W Bush on steroids. »

Many disillusioned supporters would agree. Jesselyn Radack was a justice department ethics adviser under Bush who became a whistleblower over violations of the legal rights of « American Taliban » John Walker Lindh. Now Radack works for the Government Accountability Project, defending fellow whistleblowers. She campaigned for Obama, donated money and voted for him. Now she has watched his administration – which promised transparency and whistleblower protection – crack down on national security whistleblowers.

It has used the Espionage Act – an obscure first world war anti-spy law – six times. That is more such uses in three years than all previous presidents combined. Cases include John Kiriakou, a CIA agent who leaked details of waterboarding, and Thomas Drake, who revealed the inflated costs of an NSA data collection project that had been contracted out. « We did not see this coming. Obama has led the most brutal crackdown on whistleblowers ever, » Radack said.

Yet the development fits in with a growing level of secrecy in government under Obama. Last week a report by the Information Security Oversight Office revealed 2011 had seen US officials create more than 92m classified documents: the most ever and 16m more than the year before. Officials insist much of the growth is due to simple administrative procedure, but anti-secrecy activists are not convinced. Some estimates put the number of documents wrongly classified as secret at 90%.

« We are seeing the reversal of the proper flow of information between the government and the governed. It is probably the fundamental civil liberties issue of our time, » said Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at the Brennan Centre for Justice. « The national security establishment is getting bigger and bigger. »

One astonishing example of this lies high in the mountain deserts of Utah. This is the innocuously named Utah Data Centre being built for the NSA near a tiny town called Bluffdale. When completed next year, the heavily fortified $2bn building, which is self-sufficient with its own power plant, will be five times the size of the US Capitol in Washington DC. It will house gigantic servers that will store vast amounts of data from ordinary Americans that will be sifted and mined for intelligence clues. It will cover everything from phone calls to emails to credit card receipts.

Yet the UDC is just the most obvious sign of how the operations and scope of the NSA has grown since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Under Bush, a key part was a secret « warrantless wiretapping » programme that was scrapped when it was exposed. However, in 2008 Congress passed a bill that effectively allowed the programme to continue by simply legalising key components. Under Obama, that work has intensified and earlier this year a Senate intelligence committee extended the law until 2017, which would make it last until the end of any Obama second term.

« Obama did not reverse what Bush did, he went beyond it. Obama is just able to wrap it up in a better looking package. He is more liberal, more eloquent. He does not look like a cowboy, » said James Bamford, journalist and author of numerous books about the NSA including 2008’s The Shadow Factory.

That might explain the lack of media coverage of Obama’s planned changes to a military funding law called the National Defence Authorisation Act. A clause was added to the NDAA that had such a vague definition of support of terrorism that journalists and political activists went to court claiming it threatened them with indefinite detention for things like interviewing members of Hamas or WikiLeaks. Few expected the group to win, but when lawyers for Obama refused to definitively rebut their claims, a New York judge ruled in their favour. Yet, far from seeking to adjust the NDAA’s wording, the White House is now appealing against the decision.

That hard line should perhaps surprise only the naive. « He’s expanded the secrecy regime in general, » said Radack. Yet it is the drone programme and « kill list » that have emerged as most central to Obama’s hardline national security policy. In January 2009, when Obama came to power, the drone programme existed only for Pakistan and had seen 44 strikes in five years. With Obama in office it expanded to Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia with more than 250 strikes. Since April there have been 14 strikes in Yemen alone.

Civilian casualties are common. Obama’s first strike in Yemen killed two families who were neighbours of the target. One in Pakistan missed and blew up a respected tribal leader and a peace delegation. He has deliberately killed American citizens, including the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in September last year, and accidentally killed others, such as Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman.

The drone operation now operates out of two main bases in the US, dozens of smaller installations and at least six foreign countries. There are « terror Tuesday » meetings to discuss targets which Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, sometimes attends, lending credence to those who see naked political calculation involved.

Yet for some, politics seems moot. Obama has shown himself to be a ruthless projector of national security powers at home and abroad, but the alternative in the coming election is Republican Mitt Romney.

« Whoever gets elected, whether it’s Obama or Romney, they are going to continue this very dangerous path, » said Radack. « It creates a constitutional crisis for our country. A crisis of who we are as Americans. You can’t be a free society when all this happens in secret. »

Death from the sky

• Popularly called drones, the flying robots used by Obama are referred to as unmanned aerial vehicles by the defence industry that makes them. The air force, however, calls them RPAs, or remotely piloted aircraft, as they are flown by human pilots, just at a great distance from where they are operating.

• The US air force alone has up to 70,000 people processing the surveillance information collected from drones. This includes examining footage of people and vehicles on the ground in target countries and trying to observe patterns in their movements.

• Drones are not just used by the military and intelligence community. US Customs and Border Protection has drones patrolling land and sea borders. They are used in drug busts and to prevent illegal cross-border traffic.

• It is assumed the Pentagon alone has 7,000 or so drones at work. Ten years ago there were fewer than 50. Their origins go back to the Vietnam war and beyond that to the use of reconnaissance balloons on the battlefield.

• Last year a diplomatic crisis with Iran broke out after a sophisticated US drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, crash-landed on Iranian soil. Iranian forces claimed it had been downed by sophisticated jamming technology.

Executive privilege has seduced the president into a reckless ‘kill first, ask questions later’ policy that explodes the US constitution

Michael Boyle

Guardian

11 June 2012

A Pakistani protest against US drone strikes. The latest two attacks have killed 12 people

A Pakistani protest in June 2012, after two recent US drone strikes killed 12 people. Photograph: SS Mirza/AFP/Getty

In his first campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama promised to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism – such as the use of torture, the rendition of terrorist suspects to CIA-run black sites around the globe, and the denial of basic legal rights to prisoners in Guantánamo – and to develop a counterterrorism policy that was consistent with the legal and moral tradition of the United States. In an address at the Woodrow Wilson Center in August 2007, Obama criticized the Bush administration for putting forward a « false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand », and swore to provide « our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our constitution and our freedom ».

As a candidate, Obama also promised to restore proper legislative and judicial oversight to counterterrorism operations. Rather than treat counterterrorism policy as an area of exception, operating without the normal safeguards that protect the rights of the accused, Obama promised that his approach « will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers, and that justice is not arbitrary. »

Four years later, it is clear that President Obama has delivered a very different counterterrorism policy from that which he promised on the campaign trail. (Full disclosure: I was an adviser on the Obama campaign’s counterterrorism expert group from July 2007-November 2008.) In fairness, he has delivered on a few of his promises, including closing the CIA-run « black site » prisons abroad and ordering that interrogations of all suspects be conducted according to the US army field manual, which proscribes many of the tactics widely considered torture. And some failures were not wholly his own: Obama’s inability to close Guantánamo Bay was due more to congressional opposition and to an array of legal obstacles than to his own lack of initiative.

Yet, contrary to his campaign promises, Obama has left most of the foundations of Bush’s counterterrorism approach intact, including its presumption of executive privilege, its tolerance of indefinite detention in Guantánamo and elsewhere and its refusal to grant prisoners in America’s jails abroad habeas corpus rights. While the language of the « war on terror » has been dropped, the mindset of the Bush approach – that America is forever at war, constantly on the offensive to kill « bad guys » before they get to the United States – has crept into this administration and been translated into policy in new and dangerous ways.

This fact is clearly demonstrated in a recent New York Times article, which details how President Obama has become personally involved in an elaborate internal process by which his administration decides who will be the next victim of America’s drone strikes. The article itself – clearly written with the cooperation of the administration, as the writers had unprecedented access to three dozen counterterrorism advisers – was designed to showcase Obama as a warrior president, thoughtfully wrestling with the moral issues involved in drone strikes, but forceful enough to pull the trigger when needed.

What it instead revealed was that the president has routinized and normalized extrajudicial killing from the Oval Office, taking advantage of America’s temporary advantage in drone technology to wage a series of shadow wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Without the scrutiny of the legislature and the courts, and outside the public eye, Obama is authorizing murder on a weekly basis, with a discussion of the guilt or innocence of candidates for the « kill list » being resolved in secret on « Terror Tuesday » teleconferences with administration officials and intelligence officials.

The creation of this « kill list » – as well as the dramatic escalation in drone strikes, which have now killed at least 2,400 people in Pakistan alone, since 2004 – represents a betrayal of President Obama’s promise to make counterterrorism policies consistent with the US constitution. As Charles Pierce has noted, there is nothing in the constitution that allows the president to wage a private war on individuals outside the authorization of Congress.

The spirit of the constitution was quite the opposite: all of the founders were concerned, in varying degrees, with the risk of allowing the president to exercise too much discretion when declaring war or using force abroad. For this reason, the constitution explicitly grants the right to declare war to the Congress in order to restrain the president from chasing enemies around the world based solely on his authority as commander-in-chief. The founders would be horrified, not comforted, to know that the president has implicated himself in the killing of foreign nationals in states against which the Congress has not passed a declaration of war.

Beyond bypassing the constitution and the War Powers Act, the Obama administration has also adopted a dangerously broad interpretation of the legal right to use drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad. According to his counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, the legal authority for the drone strikes derives from the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by the Congress in September 2001 to authorize the attack on Afghanistan. He notes that there is « nothing in the AUMF that restricts the use of military force against al-Qa’ida to Afghanistan ».

This interpretation treats the AUMF as a warrant to allow the president to use force against anyone at any time in a war without a defined endpoint.

Together with the bland assertion that the US has the right to self-defense against al-Qaida under international law, these legal arguments have enabled the president to expand drone operations against terrorist organizations to Yemen and Somalia, as well as to escalate the campaign against militant networks in Pakistan. To date, Obama has launched 278 drone strikes against targets in Pakistan. The use of drone strikes is now so commonplace that some critics have begun to wonder if the administration has adopted a « kill, not capture » policy, forsaking the intelligence gains of capturing suspects for an approach that leaves no one alive to pose a threat.

This vast, expansive interpretation of executive power to enable drone wars conducted in secret around the globe has also set dangerous precedent, which the administration has not realized or acknowledged. Once Obama leaves office, there is nothing stopping the next president from launching his own drone strikes, perhaps against a different and more controversial array of targets. The infrastructure and processes of vetting the « kill list » will remain in place for the next president, who may be less mindful of moral and legal implications of this action than Obama supposedly is.

For those Democrats who are comforted by the fact that Obama has the final say in authorizing drone strikes and so refuse to criticize the administration, ask yourself: would you be as comfortable if the next decision on who is killed by a drone was left to President Romney, or President Palin?

Also in contravention of his campaign promises, the Obama administration has worked to expand its power of the executive and to resist oversight from the other branches of government. While candidate Obama insisted that even terrorist suspects deserved their due process rights and a chance to defend themselves in some kind of a court, his administration has now concluded that a review of the evidence by the executive branch itself – even merely a hasty discussion during one of the « Terror Tuesdays » – is equivalent to granting a terrorist suspect due process rights. With little fanfare, it has also concluded that American citizens may now be killed abroad without access to a « judicial process ».

As the complexity and consequences of the drone strikes have grown, the administration has insisted that it alone should be trusted with the decision about when drone strikes are permitted, and consequently provides only the bare minimum of information to congressional oversight committees about drone activities.

What is also striking about Obama’s embrace of drones and targeted killings is that he – who, during his 2008 campaign, displayed awareness that America’s reckless actions abroad were damaging to its long-term interests – has become so indifferent to civilian casualties. According to statistics compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, at least 551 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, though the figure could be much higher. Yet, the Obama administration has consistently argued that almost no civilians are killed in these strikes, despite independent assessments that put the number of civilians killed as much higher.

This claim is only possible because the administration has engaged in an Orwellian contortion of language, which assumes that anyone in the area of a drone strike must be « up to no good » and therefore a militant. This assumption of guilt by association, and the grotesque misuse of definitions to cover up the deaths of innocents, including children, has allowed the administration to inflate the number of successful « hits » it has, while playing down the number of civilian casualties.

Now emboldened by this apparent success and the lack of an outcry over deaths caused by drone strikes, the administration is proposing to loosen the standards for targeting in Yemen even further by approving so-called « signature strikes », in which attacks are launched on patterns of behavior rather than the known presence of a terrorist operative. These signature strikes are almost guaranteed to increase the number of civilian casualties, as they are far more likely to catch innocent people who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The drone strikes are portrayed by the administration as successful because they are able to take out high-ranking terrorist operatives, such as Abu Yahya al-Libi . But such a portrayal conflates a tactical victory (killing one al-Qaida commander) with a strategic success (that is, dampening the growth of extremist movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan). It also rarely looks at the other side of the ledger and asks whether the drone strikes have jeopardized the stability of the governments of Pakistan and Yemen, possibly risking more chaos if they are overthrown.

During his first presidential campaign, Obama promised to control counterterrorism operations and to put them in their proper place as one piece of a wider set of relationships with other governments. But he has done the opposite, allowing short-term tactical victories against terrorist networks to overwhelm America’s wider strategic priorities and leave its relations with key governments in a parlous state. His embrace of drones and his willingness to shoot first may also be policies that the US comes to regret when its rivals, such as China begin to develop and use their own drones.

Beyond simply failing to live up to campaign promises, the real tragedy of Obama’s counterterrorism policy is that he has squandered an unprecedented opportunity to redefine the struggle against al-Qaida in a way that moves decisively beyond the Bush administration’s mindset. Instead, he has provided another iteration of that approach, with a level of cold-blooded ruthlessness and a contempt for the constitutional limits imposed on executive power that rivals his predecessor.

Instead of restoring counterterrorism to its proper place among America’s other foreign policy priorities, President Obama has been seduced by political expediency and the lure of new technology into adopting a policy that kills first and asks questions later. He may succeed in crippling al-Qaida and preventing some attacks today, but it is now harder than ever to believe that a young child in Pakistan hearing the whirring noises of drones above them will look up and see Obama’s America as « the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world ».

IN democracies like ours, there have always been deep bonds between the public and its wars. Citizens have historically participated in decisions to take military action, through their elected representatives, helping to ensure broad support for wars and a willingness to share the costs, both human and economic, of enduring them.

In America, our Constitution explicitly divided the president’s role as commander in chief in war from Congress’s role in declaring war. Yet these links and this division of labor are now under siege as a result of a technology that our founding fathers never could have imagined.

Just 10 years ago, the idea of using armed robots in war was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. Today, the United States military has more than 7,000 unmanned aerial systems, popularly called drones. There are 12,000 more on the ground. Last year, they carried out hundreds of strikes — both covert and overt — in six countries, transforming the way our democracy deliberates and engages in what we used to think of as war.

We don’t have a draft anymore; less than 0.5 percent of Americans over 18 serve in the active-duty military. We do not declare war anymore; the last time Congress actually did so was in 1942 — against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. We don’t buy war bonds or pay war taxes anymore. During World War II, 85 million Americans purchased war bonds that brought the government $185 billion; in the last decade, we bought none and instead gave the richest 5 percent of Americans a tax break.

And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

For the first 200 years of American democracy, engaging in combat and bearing risk — both personal and political — went hand in hand. In the age of drones, that is no longer the case.

Today’s unmanned systems are only the beginning. The original Predator, which went into service in 1995, lacked even GPS and was initially unarmed; newer models can take off and land on their own, and carry smart sensors that can detect a disruption in the dirt a mile below the plane and trace footprints back to an enemy hide-out.

There is not a single new manned combat aircraft under research and development at any major Western aerospace company, and the Air Force is training more operators of unmanned aerial systems than fighter and bomber pilots combined. In 2011, unmanned systems carried out strikes from Afghanistan to Yemen. The most notable of these continuing operations is the not-so-covert war in Pakistan, where the United States has carried out more than 300 drone strikes since 2004.

Yet this operation has never been debated in Congress; more than seven years after it began, there has not even been a single vote for or against it. This campaign is not carried out by the Air Force; it is being conducted by the C.I.A. This shift affects everything from the strategy that guides it to the individuals who oversee it (civilian political appointees) and the lawyers who advise them (civilians rather than military officers).

It also affects how we and our politicians view such operations. President Obama’s decision to send a small, brave Navy Seal team into Pakistan for 40 minutes was described by one of his advisers as “the gutsiest call of any president in recent history.” Yet few even talk about the decision to carry out more than 300 drone strikes in the very same country.

I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.

THE change is not limited to covert action. Last spring, America launched airstrikes on Libya as part of a NATO operation to prevent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government from massacring civilians. In late March, the White House announced that the American military was handing over combat operations to its European partners and would thereafter play only a supporting role.

The distinction was crucial. The operation’s goals quickly evolved from a limited humanitarian intervention into an air war supporting local insurgents’ efforts at regime change. But it had limited public support and no Congressional approval.

When the administration was asked to explain why continuing military action would not be a violation of the War Powers Resolution — a Vietnam-era law that requires notifying Congress of military operations within 48 hours and getting its authorization after 60 days — the White House argued that American operations did not “involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof.” But they did involve something we used to think of as war: blowing up stuff, lots of it.

Starting on April 23, American unmanned systems were deployed over Libya. For the next six months, they carried out at least 146 strikes on their own. They also identified and pinpointed the targets for most of NATO’s manned strike jets. This unmanned operation lasted well past the 60-day deadline of the War Powers Resolution, extending to the very last airstrike that hit Colonel Qaddafi’s convoy on Oct. 20 and led to his death.

Choosing to make the operation unmanned proved critical to initiating it without Congressional authorization and continuing it with minimal public support. On June 21, when NATO’s air war was lagging, an American Navy helicopter was shot down by pro-Qaddafi forces. This previously would have been a disaster, with the risk of an American aircrew being captured or even killed. But the downed helicopter was an unmanned Fire Scout, and the story didn’t even make the newspapers the next day.

Congress has not disappeared from all decisions about war, just the ones that matter. The same week that American drones were carrying out their 145th unauthorized airstrike in Libya, the president notified Congress that he had deployed 100 Special Operations troops to a different part of Africa.

This small unit was sent to train and advise Ugandan forces battling the cultish Lord’s Resistance Army and was explicitly ordered not to engage in combat. Congress applauded the president for notifying it about this small noncombat mission but did nothing about having its laws ignored in the much larger combat operation in Libya.

We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war.

And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means.

WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it. Freeing the executive branch to act as it chooses may be appealing to some now, but many future scenarios will be less clear-cut. And each political party will very likely have a different view, depending on who is in the White House.

Unmanned operations are not “costless,” as they are too often described in the news media and government deliberations. Even worthy actions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, was drawn into terrorism by the very Predator strikes in Pakistan meant to stop terrorism.

Similarly, C.I.A. drone strikes outside of declared war zones are setting a troubling precedent that we might not want to see followed by the close to 50 other nations that now possess the same unmanned technology — including China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran.

A deep deliberation on war was something the framers of the Constitution sought to build into our system. Yet on Tuesday, when President Obama talks about his wartime accomplishments during the State of the Union address, Congress will have to admit that its role has been reduced to the same part it plays during the president’s big speech. These days, when it comes to authorizing war, Congress generally sits there silently, except for the occasional clapping. And we do the same at home.

Last year, I met with senior Pentagon officials to discuss the many tough issues emerging from our growing use of robots in war. One of them asked, “So, who then is thinking about all this stuff?”

America’s founding fathers may not have been able to imagine robotic drones, but they did provide an answer. The Constitution did not leave war, no matter how it is waged, to the executive branch alone.

In a democracy, it is an issue for all of us.

Peter W. Singer is the director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution and author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.”

They kill without warning, are comparatively cheap, risk no American lives, and produce triumphant headlines. Over the last three years, drone strikes have quietly become the Obama administration’s weapon of choice against terrorists.

Since taking office, President Barack Obama has unleashed five times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush authorized in his second term in the White House. He has transformed drone attacks from a rarely used tactic that killed dozens each year to a twice-weekly onslaught that killed more than 1,000 people in Pakistan in 2010. Last year, American drone strikes spread to Somalia and Libya as well.

In the wake of the troubled, trillion-dollar American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, drone strikes are a talisman in Washington. To cash-strapped officials, drones eliminate the United States’ enemies at little human, political, or financial cost.

The sweeping use of drone strikes in Pakistan, though, has created unprecedented anti-American sentiment in that country. While U.S. intelligence officials claim that only a handful of civilians have died in drone attacks, the vast majority of Pakistanis believe thousands have perished. Last year, the Pakistani government apparently blocked American drone strikes after tensions escalated between the two governments.

After a CIA contractor killed two Pakistanis in January and American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in March, there were no drone strikes there for weeks at a time. In November, drone strikes stopped again after an American airstrike killed 26 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan. As of late December, there had been no strikes in Pakistan for six weeks, the longest pause since 2008, and a glaring example of the limitations of drone warfare.

My perspective on drones is an unusual one. In November 2008, the Afghan Taliban kidnapped two Afghan colleagues and me outside Kabul and ferried us to the tribal areas of Pakistan. For the next seven months, we were held captive in North and South Waziristan, the focus of the vast majority of American drone strikes during that period. In June 2009, we escaped. Several months later, I wrote about the experience in a series of articles for the New York Times, my employer at the time.

Throughout our captivity, American drones were a frequent presence in the skies above North and South Waziristan. Unmanned, propeller-driven aircraft, they sounded like a small plane – a Piper Cub or Cessna-circling overhead. Dark specks in a blue sky, they could be spotted and tracked with the naked eye. Our guards studied their flight patterns for indications of when they might strike. When two drones appeared overhead they thought an attack was imminent. Sometimes it was, sometimes it was not.

The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.

Our Afghan and Pakistani Taliban guards despised the drones and disparaged them as a cowardly way for America to wage war. The 2009 surge in drone attacks in Pakistan prompted our guards to hate Obama even more than they hated Bush.

The most difficult day of our captivity was March 25, 2009. Late that afternoon, a drone attack occurred just outside our house in Makeen, South Waziristan. Missiles fired by an American drone had struck dozens of yards away. After chunks of mud and bits of shrapnel landed in our courtyard. Our guards hustled me down a hillside and ordered me to get inside a station wagon. They told me to lie down, place a scarf over my face, and say nothing. We all knew that if local militants enraged by the attack learned an American prisoner was in the area, I would be killed. As I lay in the car, I heard militants shout with fury as they collected their dead. A woman wailed somewhere in the distance. I silently recited the Lord’s Prayer.

After 15 minutes, the guards took me back to our house and explained what had happened. Missiles from American drones had struck two cars, they said, killing seven Arab militants and local Taliban fighters. Later, I learned that one of our guards suggested I be taken to the site of the attack and ritually beheaded. The chief guard overruled him.

The strikes fueled a vicious paranoia among the Taliban. For months, our guards told us of civilians being rounded up, accused of working as American spies and hung in local markets. Immediately after that attack in South Waziristan, a feverish hunt began for a local spy who the Taliban were convinced had somehow secretly guided the Americans to the two cars.

Several days after the strike, our guards told us foreign militants had arrested a local man and accused him of guiding the drones. After the jihadists disemboweled the villager and chopped off his leg, he « confessed » to being an American spy, they said. Then the militants decapitated the man and hung his corpse in the local bazaar as a warning.

My time in captivity filled me with enormous sympathy for the Pakistani civilians trapped between the deranged Taliban and ruthless American technology. They inhabit a hell on earth in the tribal areas. Both sides abuse them. I am convinced Taliban claims that only civilians die in drone strikes are false, as are American claims that only militants do. Drone strikes are not a silver bullet against militancy, nor are they a wanton practice that fells only civilians. They weaken militant groups without eliminating them.

During my time in the tribal areas, it was clear that drone strikes disrupted militant operations. Taliban commanders frequently changed vehicles and moved with few bodyguards to mask their identities. Afghan, Pakistani, and foreign Taliban avoided gathering in large numbers. The training of suicide bombers and roadside bomb makers was carried out in small groups to avoid detection.

Altogether, 22 drone strikes killed at least 76 militants and 41 civilians in North and South Waziristan during our seven months in captivity, according to news reports. Some strikes clearly succeeded. Our guards reacted with fury, for example, when Uzbek bomb makers they knew were killed in a drone strike. They also showed my Afghan colleagues the graves of children they said died in strikes.

It is impossible for journalists, human rights groups, or outside investigators to definitively determine the ratio of civilians to militants killed by American drones. The United States refuses to release details or publicly acknowledge the attacks, which they insist are classified. Militants, meanwhile, refuse to allow unfettered access to the area.

The strikes kill senior leaders and weaken Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and the Afghan Taliban, but militants use exaggerated reports of civilian deaths to recruit volunteers and stoke anti-Americanism. I believe the drones create a stalemate between militant groups and U.S. intelligence agencies.

While drones are seen as a triumph of American technology in the United States, they provoke intense public anger in Pakistan. Exaggerated Taliban claims of civilian deaths are widely believed by the Pakistanis, who see the strikes as a flagrant violation of the United States’ purported support for human rights. Analysts believe that killing a senior militant in a drone strike is a tactical victory but a loss over the long term because it weakens public support for an American-backed crackdown on militancy in Pakistan, which many analysts think is essential.

« In the short term, it puts (the militants) on the back foot, » a former United Nations official in the region who spoke on condition of anonymity told me. « In the overall community, it’s devastating. »

Worsening the problem, the U.S. has allowed the Pakistani military to falsely claim that it has no control over the drone strikes. American drones operate out of Pakistani air force bases with the permission of Pakistani forces, yet the Pakistani public is told that a foreign power is carrying out unilateral attacks inside their country and violating their sovereignty.

Pakistan is not the only country experiencing drone attacks. Since 2001, the United States has carried out drone strikes in five other countries – Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya and Somalia. In Libya, the American military carried out 146 drone strikes during NATO’s seven-month bombing campaign against the Gaddafi regime. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA and the American military do not disclose the number of attacks, but a senior American military official put the number at « dozens » since 2001.

The most alarming pattern has emerged in Yemen and Somalia. The exact number of strikes in both countries is unknown. Local media in Yemen report strikes as often as once a week, but American officials decline to confirm that.

On September 30, 2011, a drone flying over Yemen set a new precedent. Without a trial or any public court proceeding, the United States government killed two American citizens, Anwar Al Awlaki and Samir Khan. The target of the attack was Awlaki, a New Mexico-born Yemeni-American whose charismatic preaching inspired terrorist attacks around the world, including the 2009 killing of 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas. Civil liberties groups argued that a dangerous new threshold had been crossed. For the first time in American history, the United States had executed two of its citizens without trial.

The Obama Administration cited a secret Justice Department memorandum as justification for the attack. Its authors contended that Awlaki’s killing was legal due to his role in attacks on the United States and his presence in an area where American forces could not easily capture him. The administration declined to publicly release the full document.

Many experts insist a new approach to drones is desperately needed. Strikes should continue, they say, but in a vastly different manner. Among the changes they suggest: The U.S. must end its absurd practice of refusing to publicly acknowledge attacks. Many analysts also believe Washington should accede to longstanding demands from the Pakistani, Afghan, and other local governments for more control over the use of drones. Their reasoning is simple: Along with the United States, local officials will then bear the burden of building local public support for drone strikes.

« They have asked for sharing the responsibility, but also means sharing the technology, » Vali Nasr, a Tufts University professor and former senior Obama Administration adviser on Pakistan, told me. « We have resisted that, but the benefit is that you give the local government ownership. »

For all their shortcomings, drones do present a tempting though far from perfect martial option. Drones can reach jihadists in remote mountains and deserts inaccessible to American and local troops. They have taken out top militants, such as the Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, who was responsible for the killing of thousands of Pakistani civilians in suicide bombings. And they have slowed the training of suicide bombers and roadside bomb makers, most of whose victims are innocent Afghan and Pakistani bystanders, not American troops.

But drones alone are not the answer. Over the long term, it will be moderate Muslims who defeat militancy, not technology.

Why President Obama’s kill list controversy is only good news for his reelection campaign.

Michael A. Cohen

Foreign policy

June 6, 2012

Last week, two blockbuster New York Times stories cast perhaps the most unfavorable light on President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy performance since he took office. First, there was the revelation that Obama maintains a « kill list » of potential al Qaeda targets and signs off personally on major drone strikes in the continuing global war on terror. While Obama’s involvement suggests a certain level of rigor in target selection, the article also highlighted the fact that the president is ordering military strikes, including against U.S. citizens, without any congressional or judicial oversight.

Next came the revelation that under Obama’s presidency the United States has not only continued but ramped up a de facto war with Iran, with cybertools intended to disrupt Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapon.

Both stories speak to the lack of transparency in the Obama White House on matters of national security — as well as to the president’s somewhat promiscuous use of force against declared and undeclared enemies of the United States. But if one puts aside the many good reasons to be concerned about such policies on legal and moral grounds, it’s highly unlikely that Obama will be hurt politically by these revelations: if anything, quite the opposite. While some members of the president’s own party might be offended by Obama’s actions, the great majority of Americans seem blithely unconcerned. The stories will, in fact, neutralize Republican attack lines and bolster the president’s already strong public ratings on national security. In a country that still maintains ill will toward Iran for the hostage crisis 30-plus years ago and fears the potential machinations of jihadi terrorists, Obama’s actions are political winners.

To understand why the existence of a presidential kill list won’t do much to dent Obama’s strong foreign-policy standing, it’s important to remember that Americans don’t just like drone warfare — they love it. A Washington Post poll this February found that 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s drone policy. (It’s hard to think of anything that 83 percent of Americans agree on these days.) In addition, a whopping 77 percent of liberal Democrats support the use of drones — and 65 percent are fine with missile strikes against U.S. citizens, as was the case with the Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed last September by a drone.

The popularity of unmanned vehicles is not difficult to understand. They’re cheap; they keep Americans out of harm’s way; and they kill « bad guys. » That unnamed and unseen civilians may be getting killed in the process or that the attacks stretch the outer limits of statutory law are of less concern. Indeed, rare is the American war where such legal and humanitarian niceties mattered much to the electorate.

And, in fairness to Obama, nothing about the drone war should be a major surprise to the American people. Throughout the 2008 campaign, then-Senator Obama was a loud, uncompromising advocate of ramping up cross-border drone attacks against al Qaeda in Pakistan. His August 2008 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention didn’t feature a passionate call to close the Guantánamo Bay prison or wind down the war on terror. Rather, Obama said this: « I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. You know, John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell — but he won’t even go to the cave where he lives. »

Not a lot of subtlety there, but then again not much in the way of ambiguity about Obama’s plans as president.

As for cyberwarfare with Iran, this falls into a similar category as drones. Americans don’t like Iran; they are deeply concerned about Tehran getting a nuclear weapon and have demonstrated a surprising willingness to countenance a military solution to stopping Iran from getting a bomb. In fact, a March 2012 poll indicated that 53 percent of Americans support taking military action against Iran « even if it causes gasoline and fuel prices in the United States to go up. » And no one likes when gas prices go up.

Given those numbers, it’s not hard to imagine that an overwhelming majority of Americans would be fully supportive of a stealth cybercampaign as a cheap and efficient way to thwart Iran’s nuclear aspirations. That such a move might represent an act of war by the United States against Iran is again likely of peripheral concern.

If anything, it’s a mark in Obama’s political favor — a sign of his seriousness in keeping Americans safe from terrorists, from Iranians with nuclear weapons, or from other hyped-up potential threats to the United States. Beyond the immediate political benefit of proving Obama’s toughness, both New York Times stories have the added benefit of undercutting a key Republican critique. If there is any one issue on which Obama is somewhat vulnerable to GOP attack it is on Iran and the notion that he has not been tough enough in preventing that country from developing a bomb. Indeed, Republicans have been clamoring for increased covert action against Iran for months. Now, the cyberwar story demonstrates that Obama is doing precisely that. And the drones story is a further reminder that Obama has taken the fight to al Qaeda, which includes the killing of Osama bin Laden and now the terrorist group’s No. 2, Abu Yahya al-Libi. The White House can hardly go wrong in reminding Americans of that fact.

The final piece of the puzzle for the White House is that neither Obama’s drone war nor his secret war against Iran engages any serious partisan passions. Republicans are hardly going to be critical of kill lists or covert war against Iran. They might keep their praise to a minimum, but these are precisely the sorts of policies that Republicans have long supported. Even presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has been anything but consistent in his attacks on Obama, would find it difficult to hit Obama on these fronts. In reality, there is a disquieting political consensus in support of these policies.

If there is any place where Obama is likely to get grief, though, it is from his own liberal base. Since the revelations appeared in the New York Times, the outcry from the president’s left wing has been unremittingly harsh. But it’s hard to imagine that the Obama campaign in Chicago is worrying much about such criticism. That Obama’s national security policies upset liberals only further confirms his image as not your typical Jimmy Carter/Michael Dukakis/John Kerry liberal afraid to use American power. These, of course, are political canards, but potent ones — and they have clearly shaped the Obama administration’s thinking on foreign policy since the day he took office.

In the end, there are plenty of legitimate policy reasons for the course that Obama has set in fighting terrorism and restraining Iran’s nuclear program. But it doesn’t take a cynic to recognize there is a tangible political benefit here as well. After all, these stories weren’t leaked to the New York Times by accident.

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for Foreign Policy’s Election 2012 channel and a fellow at the Century Foundation.

D.C. firm inks lucrative public-relations contract with Bahrain

As the Gulf monarchy cracks down on an international aid group, it hires Qorvis for $40,000-per-month P.R. job

Justin Elliott

Aug 8, 2011

D.C. firm inks lucrative public-relations contract with BahrainA Shiite Bahraini woman gestures as others shout anti-government slogans outside a public forum Saturday, July 23, 2011, outside a religious community center in Sanabis, Bahrain, denouncing the alleged destruction and vandalizing of Shiite mosques, community centers and cemeteries during a government crackdown on a largely Shiite spring uprising. Clerics who spoke during the meeting, blamed Saudi Arabia for targeting religious sites, because they allegedly distrust their own Shia minority and sent forces to help quell the Bahrain uprising. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali)(Credit: AP)

Bahrain is in the news again, this time for what appears to be the comically evil persecution of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.

So, naturally, the ruling monarchy of the Gulf nation has hired a top Washington public relations firm to burnish (or attempt to salvage) its image, according to a new foreign agent registration filing. Qorvis Communications will be paid $40,000 per month, plus expenses, for the public relations work, according to a contract submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Here is the latest on the events in Bahrain, where the Sunni regime’s crackdown on a Shia protest movement is now focusing on prosecuting or harassing those — including doctors — who came to the aid of protesters back in the spring:

The trouble for the group — which is also known by its English name, Doctors Without Borders — started about a week ago. Activists say a young man who had been protesting in his village was hit in the head at close range by police firing a tear-gas canister.

The protester went to the MSF office in the capital, Manama. Owing to the severity of his injuries, an ambulance was called, and the patient was taken to the hospital. On July 28, the next day, 14 police vehicles pulled up to the MSF office. Authorities raided the building and reportedly took away furniture, medicine and patient files — and arrested the group’s local driver, Saeed Mahdi.

Now, the rented villa that used to house the MSF office is locked up and empty.

Qorvis distributed a statement to American journalists writing about the incident, with the Bahrain Health Ministry claiming that Doctors Without Borders “was operating an unlicensed medical center in a residential apartment building.”

Qorvis, which promises clients “integrated strategies to help you tell your story better,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its work for Bahrain. The contract is signed by Qorvis partner Matthew Lauer, who was previously a public diplomacy official in the Bush State Department and a spokesman for the South Carolina Democratic Party.

Earlier this year Huffington Post reported that several Qorvis partners had departed the firm because, in the words of one unnamed insider, “I just have trouble working with despotic dictators killing their own people.” Qorvis had previously worked for Bahrain through another PR

It is the dress that fuelled a thousand ugly rumours – the simple black outfit, decorated with red ribbons and buttons, which falsely convinced so many Australians 25 years ago that Lindy Chamberlain had killed her baby, Azaria.

Now, for the first time, the black outfit and matching red bootees, will go on show at the National Museum of Australia – the most controversial of around 500 oddities in the museum’s collection usually hidden away from view.

The dress divided Australia when Azaria disappeared from the campsite at Uluru in August 1980. Many who disbelieved the mother’s insistence a dingo had taken her baby thought dressing a child in black was evidence of witchcraft.

« The black dress often featured in the conspiracy theories, » says Guy Hansen, who has curated Captivating and Curious, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the National Historic Collection.

« When people saw photographs of the dress they thought it unusual a mother should dress a baby in black. »

But isn’t it ghoulish to put such an emotional item on display? Hansen admits that « it obviously required considerable sensitivity », but says museum staff « felt no qualms ».

Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton donated the dress – and 200 other items connected with Azaria’s death and her own subsequent trials – to the museum in 1993. The dress and bootees « have become part of our national imagination », Hansen says.

« It’s an event which entered political historical consciousness. If you think back over 20th century Australian history, there are probably only two dozen events which every Australian knows about and talks about, no matter what football code they follow or what side of politics they are on. The Dismissal, Gallipoli – and the Chamberlain case.

« Lindy Chamberlain has a very strong belief that the material associated with the trial needs to be preserved. The museum saw the Chamberlain case as one of those iconic events … which would remain a talking point long into the future. »

Other items on display when the exhibition opens on December 14 include a thylacine carcass, Lachlan Macquarie’s ceremonial dirk (dagger) and Thomas Mitchell’s duelling pistols.

I was born fourth of March 1948 in Whakatane, New Zealand. Mum was from New Zealand; Dad was from the pioneering Murchison family in Victoria. Dad’s nickname was “Mountain”. His name was Cliff. We’d say, “I’m Cliff, drop over some time.” I’ve travelled widely throughout the Outback. Growing up, I lived in every state except Western Australia. We averaged a shift every 12 months. I can remember when I visited Ayers Rock the first time: It was after a 10 year drought. We were pulling a trailer with a Nissan. Everyone else was complaining ‘cause of sore bums on seats but to us it was just so dusty. We did a tyre and then did another on a road to Mt. Connor. Then, there were 2 tracks. We were told to get to Angas Downs and ask which way. “Yeah, no problems,” said the locals. “Same distance, just take your pick.” So off we headed.

We were okay the first 50 miles, then it got more and more deserted … hardly any vegetation. Dad and the collie slept on a mattress in the trailer. I had the front seat; Mum had the back. I opened the window and poked my feet out. I woke up and there were dozens of camel pats outside the window and they’d slobbered on my feet and on the windows. I’d have died if I’d woken up with a camel lickin’ my feet. The road stopped in a series of sandhills. We had a slow-leaking puncture and we’d already used our spare. Dad said, “I reckon the road’s over there,” and made a run up a sandhill. This was in an ordinary car, mind you, not a four wheel drive. We got up and it was a hundred foot sandhill and we rolled back down onto the road. Nobody could have been on it for years.

We caught 2 lizards, Biggles and Archie, and took them with us for ages. When we got to the other end of the road it had a sign warning, “Do not travel this road. 80 miles of shifting sand. No water or habitation.” That was in 1964. We sat on top of Ayers Rock and counted the clumps of bush. One day it was Sabbath and we didn’t want to drive, so we threw doonas over bushes and made bean bags and lay around reading all afternoon. We signed the first or second book that was ever on top of the rock. It went back years. I think they put a new one in every 2 days in the height of the tourist season now.

One camping trip we were sitting in the bed of the Burdekin River in northern Queensland. It started raining nearby and within 5 minutes our camp was 18 inches deep in running water. You learn not to do these things. At another place, Stathgorden Station, Australia’s second biggest spread in Cape York, we went croc catching and caught this croc, 3 foot 6 inches, and I held it while Michael sat in the boat with his legs crossed all the way back. We tied it up overnight, photographed it then let it go. If they’re hungry, the crocs will go up the river bank and inland a quarter of a mile looking for food and they run about 30 miles per hour. One time this wild boar came for us. A mate told us to climb a tree. I thought he was joking and here was me standing there with a fishing rod. I was gonna jam it up its nose.

When we went to the Rock, we’d been camping for years. I can make a fire without matches and find water in arid country and live off the native plants if I have to. When you have those skills it’s all right going Outback. You still hear of people going off on the Birdsville Track without spare petrol and tyres and water simply ‘cause they don’t know. They’re from towns and used to going to a store for things when in a pinch. There’s nothing wrong with four wheel driving or camping if you use your common sense. But accidents will happen and you’ve got to be prepared.

I’d like to see first aid kits and fire extinguishers compulsory in vehicles, and first aid skills courses compulsory too. We can save a lot of lives if we have a basis to fall back on instead of panic. A lot of it is just common sense but it has to be explained.

Azaria means “Blessed of God” in Hebrew. Do you know the authorities still won’t let me put up a marker in the area of Ayers Rock or even add her name to the list on an existing plaque. Eventually they will.

Resist life’s downturns with God and laughter beside you and life will always have a rosy lining.

On the night of 17th August 1980, Lindy’s 9 week old baby Azaria disappeared from the tent in which her family was camping at Ayers Rock in Central Australia. Lindy claimed to have seen a dingo leaving the tent with a bundle in its mouth which she believed to be her baby. A week later bloodstained baby clothes were found nearby, but no body. The original inquest in December at which the families present at Ayers Rock gave evidence, concluded that a dingo had taken and probably killed Azaria, but 2 years later Lindy and her husband were charged with the murder of Azaria. Lindy was found guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. She gave birth to a second daughter ~ Kahlia, in Darwin Gaol. In February 1986 a baby’s matinee jacket was found at Avers Rock, substantiating part of the Chamberlain’s story, and Lindy was released, the balance of her sentence remitted. Lindy and Michael have received financial compensation but are still seeking legal redress from the Northern Territory Government in this case that divided Australia, a ‘murder’ case which admitted no body, no weapon, no eyewitnesses and no motive. The Prosecution’s case hinged on forensic evidence which was later discredited. It is a fact that the Press for years blasted Lindy and Michael Chamberlain with an amount of sensational publicity unprecedented in Australia.

I had met Lindy a couple of times when she came shopping to Northgate, Hornsby. I had a caricature shop there under the escalators for 14 years. She would watch me sketching. I have always been impressed by her self esteem and her sense of humour ~ very different from how she is portrayed by the media. She is a warm, jovial person who really likes herself and enjoys a joke. Lindy recommended her book, “Through My Eyes” and, on going over to the bookshop for it, she found it was in the fiction section. She was understandably upset and the manageress moved her books to the Australiana section. Australia has eventually found her innocent. Wouldn’t it be about time to acknowledge it by allowing a headstone or a memorial to Azaria?

Voir encore:

Crime Australian Case Closed: A Dingo Really Did Take a Missing Baby 32 Years Ago

Posted on June 12, 2012 at 8:50am by Liz Klimas Liz Klimas

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CANBERRA, Australia (The Blaze/AP) — “Maybe the dingo ate your baby.“ The line from the 1988 film ”A Cry in the Dark” starring Meryl Streep and made even more famous by Seinfeld’s Elaine played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is now confirmed true. A coroner, 32 years after a 9-week-old infant vanished from an Outback campsite in a case that bitterly divided Australians, found a dingo really did take the baby.

A coroner in the northern city of Darwin concluded Tuesday that a dingo, or wild dog, had taken Azaria Chamberlain from her parents’ tent near Ayers Rock, the red monolith in the Australian desert now known by its Aboriginal name Uluru.

That is what her parents, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and Michael Chamberlain, had maintained from the beginning.

Coroner Rules a Dingo Did in Fact Take 9 Week Old Azaria Chamberlain in 1980 Disappearance

The eyes of the parents welled with tears as the findings of the fourth inquest into their daughter’s disappearance were announced, watched by people around Australia on live television.

Watch the AP report:

“We’re relieved and delighted to come to the end of this saga,” a tearful but smiling Chamberlain-Creighton, since divorced and remarried, told reporters outside the court.

The first inquest in 1981 had also blamed a dingo. But a second inquest a year later charged Chamberlain-Creighton with murder and her husband with being an accessory after the fact. She was convicted and served more than three years in prison before that decision was overturned. A third inquest in 1995 left the cause of death open.

Coroner Rules a Dingo Did in Fact Take 9 Week Old Azaria Chamberlain in 1980 Disappearance

“The dingo has done it. I’m absolutely thrilled to bits,” said Yvonne Cain, one of the 12 jurors in the 1982 trial that convicted a then-pregnant Chamberlain-Creighton of murder. “I‘d always had my doubts and have become certain she’s innocent.”

Cain said she still encounters people who doubt the couple’s innocence, but they inevitably misunderstand what evidence there was against them.

“When people say she’s guilty, I say: `You have no idea what they’re talking about – I was there,’” she said.

Coroner Rules a Dingo Did in Fact Take 9 Week Old Azaria Chamberlain in 1980 Disappearance

The case became famous internationally through the movie “A Cry in the Dark,“ called ”Evil Angles” in Europe, in which Streep played the mother.

Many Australians initially did not believe that a dingo was strong enough to take away the baby, whose body has never been recovered. Public opinion swayed harshly against the couple; some even spat on Chamberlain-Creighton and howled like dingoes outside her house.

No similar dingo attack had been documented at the time, but in recent years the wild dogs native to Australia have been blamed for three fatal attacks on children. Few doubt the couple’s story today, but the latest inquest – which the family had fought to get – made it official that Azaria was killed in a dingo attack.

An expert on dingo behavior, Brad Purcell, said he was not surprised that a dingo would enter a tent and take a baby while older siblings slept.

Purcell suspects that many people blamed Chamberlain-Creighton for leaving the baby in a tent where a dingo could have been attracted by her crying.

“She was almost being condemned because she wasn’t acting as a responsible parent,” Purcell told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

But not all Australians accept the latest ruling.

A policeman who was at Uluru the night Azaria disappeared said he still believes the first coroner’s finding that there was some human intervention.

Frank Morris, who has since retired from the police force, said while he was not trying to blame the parents, he thought someone played a part in moving clothing Azaria wore that night.

“We don’t know who. That is the $64,000 question,” Morris said.

“If you go to court enough times, you are bound to get a win sooner or later,” Morris added of the parents’ victory Tuesday.

The parents and the eldest of their three surviving children, Aiden Chamberlain, 38, on Tuesday collected Azaria’s new death certificate. The son made national news in 2006 when he used as his wedding car the same yellow sedan that took the family to Uluru in 1980 and that a forensic scientist wrongly determined was spattered with an infant’s blood.

Years later, more sophisticated tests determined the “blood” was a combination of spilled milk and a chemical sprayed during manufacture under the car’s dashboard.

“We’re relieved and delighted to come to the end of this saga,” a tearful but smiling Chamberlain-Creighton told reporters outside the court.

Coroner Rules a Dingo Did in Fact Take 9 Week Old Azaria Chamberlain in 1980 Disappearance

She later said she was undecided whether the coroner’s finding was a cause for celebration.

“I celebrate the final triumph of truth, but I don’t celebrate her death and the two are so intertwined – I have no idea what I feel about that,” she told Nine Network television in a paid exclusive interview.

Coroner Elizabeth Morris said she was “satisfied that the evidence is sufficiently adequate, clear, cogent and exact and that the evidence excludes all other reasonable possibilities.”

The findings mirror those of the first coroner’s inquest in 1981. But that inquest found that somebody had later interfered with Azaria’s clothing, which was later found relatively unscathed in the desert.

A second coroner’s inquest triggered a Northern Territory Supreme Court trial that resulted in Chamberlain-Creighton being found guilty of slashing her daughter’s throat and making it look like a dingo attack.

She was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to life in prison with hard labor.

She was released in 1986 after evidence was found that backed up her version of events: the baby’s jacket, found near a dingo den, which helped explain the condition of the rest of the baby’s clothing. A Royal Commission, the highest form of investigation in Australia, debunked much of the forensic evidence used at her trial and her conviction was overturned.

A third inquest could not determine the cause of death.

The fourth inquest heard new evidence of dingo attacks, including three fatal attacks on children since the third inquest.

Morris, the coroner, noted that dingo experts disagree on whether a dingo could have removed the clothing so neatly and without causing more damage.

“It would have been very difficult for a dingo to have removed Azaria from her clothing without causing more damage than what was observed on it, however it would have been possible for it to have done so,” she said.

Michael Chamberlain had threatened to go the Northern Territory Supreme Court to force another inquest if Morris had not agreed to reopen the case. Another coroner had rejected his application in 2004 for a fourth inquest to challenge the 1995 finding.

“This has been a terrifying battle, bitter at times, but now some healing and a chance to put our daughter’s spirit to rest,” Chamberlain told reporters.

He said his quest for a death certificate that acknowledged his daughter had been killed by a dingo had seemed to be a “mission impossible.”

“This battle to get to the legal truth about what caused Azaria’s death has taken too long,” Chamberlain said.

“However, I am here to tell you that you can get justice even when you think that all is lost. But truth must be on your side.

In case you haven‘t seen Elaine’s famous line in Seinfeld, watch it here:

DAINA HARVEY: Good morning everybody. I would like to welcome you all to the National Museum of Australia. This is the third in a series of talks that look at the stories that are here in the Eternity gallery at the National Museum. My name is Daina Harvey and I am the Assistant Director of Audience Development and Public Programs here at the Museum. I would like to welcome Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton to the National Museum today. Lindy is going to be sharing her story with us and also with Sophie Jensen, who is our Senior Curator of the Eternity gallery at the National Museum.

I would like to hand over to Sophie Jensen. Sophie has worked very closely with Lindy and with Lindy’s collection here at the Museum since 1998.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Thanks very much Daina. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to this lovely event here today. We are very privileged to have Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton here with us. I don’t want to take up too much of your time because I realise it is not me you have come to talk to today. However I wanted to start by giving you some background as to how and why we stand here today in this place having this type of conversation.

Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton has had a long association with the National Museum. Her collection is one of the National Historical Collection’s true treasures. The collection began to take form in 1992 when Mrs Chamberlain-Creighton began working with the National Library of Australia across the lake to catalogue and donate her archival collection. In the process of coming together with that particular collection it became obvious that there was also a whole range of material culture items for which the National Library of Australia wasn’t the most appropriate home. That is when we began our association with Lindy, to start to document the rest of her massive collection.

The material related to the Chamberlain story is one of the most fascinating collections that have been entrusted to the Museum. It contains over 250 items in total, which document every aspect of events surrounding the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain on 17 August 1980, and the subsequent experiences of her family. Formed through working closely with the Chamberlain-Creighton family, the collection will continue to be an invaluable resource for researchers, historians, curators and the public.

Putting together the collection has not been without controversy. Both the Museum and the Chamberlain-Creighton family have faced criticism on a range of fronts for our work together. During the early years of collecting many saw the collection as being somehow in bad taste. The collecting project was seen as a way in which the Chamberlains were profiting somehow from their experiences. A number of people expressed the opinion that the case was too recent and the wounds too raw for the Museum to have anything to do with it.

When news of the National Library of Australia and National Museum of Australia collections made it into the press there was initial outrage, and the Museum was forced to defend its collecting activities. Collecting work, however, proceeded, and the first display using the material was a small exhibition called Lindy’s Story in 1994.

The publicity surrounding this exhibition was an interesting test of public opinion and mood 14 years after Azaria was taken, seven years after the royal commission headed by Justice Trevor Morling cleared the Chamberlains of any guilt or responsibility in Azaria’s disappearance, and six years after the Supreme Court of Darwin quashed all convictions and declared the Chamberlains totally innocent.

Liz Noonan from one of the Chamberlain support groups contributed some of the joke T-shirts sold during the trial and stated in an interview that she felt that the exhibition was important as it kept the case in the public mind. Perhaps it was this very thing that made so many others uncomfortable with the display. There was a high level of discomfort and a feeling that this was too recent an event to be regarded as history. The case had gone from flavour of the month to something that left a bad taste in the mouths of many Australians, who would have preferred to forget. Most particularly, people were keen to forget their own fascination and participation in the frenzy of speculation that surrounded the case.

In 2001 we accessed the collection again as we used Azaria’s small black dress within the Eternity exhibition when the Museum opened our permanent building here at Acton Peninsula. The Eternity exhibition features the stories of 50 individuals. The individuals are grouped together under emotive themes such as joy, hope, chance and passion. Azaria’s story was placed under the theme of mystery, not to examine the disappearance of Azaria herself but focusing on the mystery of the public’s fascination with the case. Why did this one event cause such upheaval, disruption and attention? The black dress was, and is, such a powerful symbol of the ability of the public to judge – not judgements based on fact but judgements of people, of behaviour and of their own perceptions of what is right and wrong and therefore who is guilty and who is innocent. The real power of the Chamberlain collection and the display of the material is the ability of material culture, of real objects, to remind us all that we are not dealing with fiction, we are dealing with real people and real events.

In an article in 2000 written in the Australian Magazine, Paul Toohey wrote: ‘Lindy and Michael Chamberlain became totally fictitious human beings, characters, unrecognisable even to themselves.’ Lindy herself reminds us of the reality of the case in her autobiography Through My Eyes when she states: ‘This is the story of a little girl who lived, and breathed, and loved and was loved.

This statement is really at the heart of the collection at the National Museum. More than anything else what these objects do is to connect us with immediacy and an intimacy to real people and to actual events. They often do this with a greater power than any words can manage. As a visitor stands before a case that contains possessions of a family that could have belonged to them, that could still belong to them, they are reminded that these events are not fiction, that these people are real, living, breathing individuals – people who felt, suffered and survived.

When viewed as a whole, the collection documents every stage of the events surrounding the Chamberlain case. A brief look at some of the items in the collection demonstrates this. We hold material that helps to document Azaria’s own short life: dresses and jumpsuits belonging to and worn by that little, breathing, very real child. The camping trip itself is represented in a range of objects, including torches used to light the tent while Azaria was being fed and tent pegs that took on a special significance following the discovery by police of a bible in which they claimed that the story of the sacrifice of Jael using a tent bag was found supposedly marked in the Chamberlains’ house. This parka is one of the items of clothing worn on the evening of 17 August, and it bears the marks of forensic investigation, as do the mattresses from the tent from which Azaria was taken. Other aspects of the case are represented in a number of the scene of incident maps, and other objects such as a souvenir tea towel from the trial – a tasteful memento to take home from your visit to Darwin.

Some of the objects like the black dress have become iconic. Some take on significance as you read the transcripts of the trials and inquests, or Lindy’s autobiography. Important markers in the trial such as the space blanket on which the dingo prints were discovered, only to disappear once the blanket was taken by police, or the miniature coffin used by Michael Chamberlain in his anti-smoking campaigns were seen by police as further evidence of the Chamberlain’s guilt.

There are a large number of objects within the collection that document Lindy’s prison experience. These range from official symbols and uniforms, such as her cell door number and her smock worn during craft activities. But they also include more intimate items that help to document some of the sorrow that can be brought about through separation from loved ones, such as a small lock of hair sent to Lindy from her daughter Kahlia’s first hair cut.

This collection also includes material related to the Chamberlains’ experiences after Lindy’s release, including the dress Lindy wore on her way home from prison and a range of props from the making of the film Evil Angels. A cushion used during Azaria’s memorial service seen beside the prop used in the film demonstrate both the accuracy of many small details in production as well as the need for film to create objects slightly larger than life. A biscuit tin gnawed at by dingoes on the Evil Angels set was given to Lindy by the dingo trainer.

When seen together these objects demonstrate their ability to illustrate some of the key aspects of the events surrounding the Chamberlains’ ordeal. They speak to issues of public opinion, media, ethics, life behind bars, family relationships, religious intolerance, as well as attitudes towards the Australian environment, women and justice. As a donor and collector, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton has been a remarkable resource for the Museum. Her own experiences of public scrutiny and analysis have made her a remarkably perceptive collector and archivist. Before you is a woman who is used to having her belongings being handled in the most public of ways. Many of these objects have been analysed, criticised and used by the police, the media and the public to make assessments of her. This brings about a remarkable and rather unique perceptiveness of the power of material culture. Lindy has used personal sentiment as well as her understanding of these issues to help put together this collection with us. Lindy’s story is still featured in the Eternity gallery. The object on display is a piece of metal from the Chamberlains’ Torana that was said to have been splattered with Azaria’s blood. This object speaks strongly to two issues: first the fallibility of science. The inability of a scientist to distinguish between sound-deadening fluid and blood demonstrates that scientists are still human and that scientific evidence is still a matter of interpretation and extrapolation. It is in the face of this type of evidence that it is still relevant to wonder: what if it were me sitting in the dock? How much trust do we place in forensic science and what role does it play in our justice system? Importantly, the object still speaks to the issue of public fascination. As the majority of content within the Eternity gallery is delivered electronically, we can see on any given day how often people are accessing stories. Without fail Lindy’s story is the second-most accessed story on any given day. She’s beaten only by the Wiggles and there are four of them, so it is really not a competition.

This continuing fascination is testament to the power of the collection and the importance that this story has for the public’s understanding and imagining of Australian history. I would like now to introduce you to Lindy as we speak about her collection, her life and her experiences. Then we will have some time for questions from the floor. I hope that you enjoy today and that you enjoy a conversation with Lindy.

Lindy, welcome back to the National Museum of Australia. It really is lovely to have you here today.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Thank you. It is interesting that, in all our time working together, we hardly ever use last names. Consequently, I have never heard you say mine before, but you said it wrong. Creighton is spelt the English way and pronounced the American way (ph. Cray-ton, not Cry-ton).

SOPHIE JENSEN: One of the interesting things that often occurs is that thing about first names and last names; because to Australia you are Lindy and people feel they are on a first-name basis with you. You are Kylie, you are Diana, you are Lindy – you are up there with them. Does that familiarity still occur to you? Do people still think ‘Lindy’ and that they know you?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Yes. Sometimes after 10 or 15 minutes into a conversation with people who have told you all about their kids, who got married, who has had the new baby and they have asked you about your children, finally you get a chance to say to them, ‘Can you tell me who you are?’ They are like, ‘I am terribly sorry, Lindy. We have your photograph along with the rest of the family on the mantelpiece and we forget that you don’t know us,’ which is lovely.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is an interesting thing because it can work both ways. People feel they know the whole story; they feel they know you; they feel they can make these kinds of comments and criticisms; but then it also works in a positive way because you have affected and influenced a lot of people without knowing it. It’s a funny kind of mixture of positive and negative.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: It is, because they do think they know everything about you yet they only know the public side of you.

SOPHIE JENSEN: One thing in particular I wanted to talk about today, Lindy, which is partly because of my own bent in coming from the Museum, is that I try to imagine myself sitting there, as you would have at some point in your house, at the moment when you must have realised, ‘I am sitting in the middle of a collection, a valuable collection.’ Did you have a moment of realisation when you thought, ‘This is of national significance’?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I probably did somewhere, that is in the past gathering dust. People started sending things in to me saying, ‘This might be of use in your case’ or ‘I thought you might like this.’ You look at them and start thinking, ‘Yes, they are important, but they start taking over the house. I shouldn’t throw them out but what do I do with them?’ When some people from the National Library said: ‘This is important’, they came around the corner of the house, not long after I got out of prison, where I had a big 44-gallon drum and I was burning letters. So some people that wrote to me are not in that collection, because we were just absolutely overrun. I could show you some photographs we took at times where there was less room in our lounge to do homework, sort the ironing or whatever, because the rest was taken over with files from the case.

I finally thought: ‘They seem too important not to keep but I have to live in the house too.’ I started going through and keeping what I called significant letters, which were not necessarily the run of the mill. I had only been doing it for about 20 minutes when the National Library of Australia people walked around the corner and told me where they were from. I could see the startled looks on their faces when I said, ‘I am just burning stuff,’ and they pleaded, ‘Please don’t’. I said, ‘What else am I going to do with it?’

I thought they were police to start off with. You get two suits walking around the corner and the first thing you think is: ‘Here we go, what do they want?’ They said, ‘We are from the National Library and this is really significant. We thought we would ask you, if you had anything that you don’t want later, can we have it?’ I said, ‘You can’t have it now because I need to go through it first.’ I don’t know why I said that because I had already read all the letters and years later it is still taking over the house. In fact I have files that go from Sophie to the lectern that are ready to come down now. That is only 12 months worth but I haven’t finished going through them. There is half a room full sitting all over the floor, and they need to go to Canberra.

I sent some things to the National Library that people sent me which I thought should stay with their letter, and they said, ‘We are really not set up for this. They should go down to the Museum.’ I replied, ‘Why would they want it?’ They said, ‘Can we ask them?’ That was the start. I think curator Richard Baker was first, or there may have been one before him, and then we found Sophie and away it went. People have sent me all sorts of things. Somebody did a scene in matchsticks and sent it in and that is there somewhere. Little things that were made for me have gone to the Museum as well.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is a remarkable kind of thing when you look at our collection and the National Library’s together. What makes it a fascinating collection, not only from a curatorial point of view but also from the public’s point of view, is that while it covers such a huge range of things, the public are also represented in the collection. It is not just about you and your story; it is about people’s responses to you, responses to the inquest, and responses to the trial.

Looking at the letters in the National Library – it has been a joy to work with you, Lindy, because you are a classifier, which appeals to us all here. You had actually marked the letters into particular categories, which were wonderful categories in themselves. The work that you have done in order to classify that material makes it a fantastic resource for researchers and people who will look at the material later. It also means that we have this glimpse into not just your experience of your own case but a whole range of Australians’ experience of your case, which is fascinating.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: The Library tells me that the 1980s is documented more in Australian history than any other decade because of everyone’s letters to me. You told me what you paid for things, what your kids thought, which schools they were going to, what you thought of all the politicians, where the sales were, what you thought of housing prices – everything is in there. One lady used to tell me what she cooked for her husband every meal and I would get it itemised in two or three letters a week. It would be breakfast, lunch and dinner, and ‘I said this to him and he said that to me’ – it is all there.

At the 25th anniversary when the University of Sydney held a symposium for the day I thought ‘this will be interesting’ because I knew a number of the papers. But I went upstairs to the other room partway through and tried to get copies of them all. It is mind-boggling: there are papers on the cartoons and films of the day and how the progress of this case affected other areas. There are papers on the gay rights movement, on women’s liberation and all sorts of things that I would think had nothing to do with the case, but they obviously saw things in it.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Your case has become a prism through which the whole of the 1980s can be explored and exposed. When I start to think about the letters I write to people now. It is a fascinating way into it all. The habit of accumulation must have been partly a self-preservation thing. Going through the number of inquests and trials that you did, thinking, ‘I might need this one day.’

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Well, as sure as you threw it away, the lawyers would say, ‘Have you got anything that says …’ and you would go, ‘Where did I put the letter that came the other day?’ The letters were important because we discovered, for instance, that within the first couple of weeks that Greg and Sally Lowe had written to us.

SOPHIE JENSEN: They were eyewitnesses, weren’t they?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: They had introduced themselves but with everything that happened at the barbecue that night … I am not good with people’s names anyway, faces yes but not names. So here we have this letter from Greg and Sally Lowe saying, ‘If there’s anything we can do to help, or if there is any people we can talk to, or if you would like us to talk to the police for you or anything like that, feel free to let us know.’ I can clearly remember saying, ‘That’s really nice of them but who were they and what would they know?’ So in it went in the drawer with everything else.

The police kept saying to us, ‘Do you know any of the people there? Have you had any contact?’ And of course we said no. Several weeks later we got a letter from one of the others – a similar thing happened. We had no idea we were getting letters from witnesses. But then later on we learned they had written to us and we went, ‘Was that you?’ Now we had mountains of letters that would fill the average bathroom, jammed tight to the top and they were all scrambled. We are talking about only to the trial. We had to go through those mountains looking for these letters, looking for letters from people that had been in hospital with me when I had Azaria. It turned out that the lady I was talking to all the time was a policewoman married to a policeman. She had written to me. Of course I hadn’t had any need for that letter until the royal commission, and then I had to go back and find it. You didn’t dare throw anything out.

Then once it got all over I said, ‘I want my life back. What am I going to do with it all?’ With letters that come in now, I basically précis the whole thing on a little tag. With the first ones I picked out certain things that I thought would probably be significant if you were going through so that, rather than somebody having to read them to find out what they wanted as I did, they could look at the tags. So you can see the progression as I learned what was what and what needed to be done.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is the making of the curator.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I think somebody should give me some little letters after my name for this. In the long run people went, ‘She’s getting paid for it,’ but I paid people to help me with it and that sort of thing. Two years ago I worked out it was 11 cents an hour. I have done two more years work on it since then so I think we are in the negative an hour.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is not good. I was saying before about the power of material culture, the letters are one thing and then you come to your possessions, many of which were taken by police and only returned to you many years after they had been taken in pieces, damaged, cut, with their tags still on.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Just because they say they will give it back, they do. But they don’t say how they will give it back.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Yes, for instance, the Torana. These items are very evocative items. When I look at Azaria’s dresses, it is a reminder for me this is a case about a real child, a baby, your daughter. I would hope that when we show them here in the Museum it reminds people about the same thing. This isn’t fiction; it is real. This is a child that lived. What is interesting for me, thinking about you as a collector with those items is: were you ever tempted to think ‘I can’t look at them. I want to throw them away.’ Letters are easy to burn, but that material culture and those objects that belong to you are personal to you more than the letters. Were you ever tempted to throw them away and think, ‘I don’t want to look at those objects any more’?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: No. You may not necessarily want to see them but you don’t want to get rid of them either. By the time it came down to some of the forensic exhibits, we were well aware of the significance to Australia. They were more the things that I didn’t want to keep around. But there are some items that the Museum has that one or two of the family is not all that happy with, such as the black dress which was Reagan’s. He’s like, ‘Mum, what if I have kids one day, and they’ve got it now?’ There’s the little white dress that Kahlia and I had one each of – mine fits her now and she’s like, ‘Mum it’s down there. I wanted that for my wedding week and they’ve got it. You know I didn’t want you to give it away. What happens when I have a daughter? We won’t be able to wear it.’ I said, ‘Well, at least it’s safe.’ It’s good enough.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Often children are the ones that have the hardest time with their parents giving away their inheritance. I think that’s probably true with your children.

This goes with that territory of being on first name basis, but for a lot of people it is though as you were born in 1980. But you are a person with a history, with a past. Looking back at the first couple of interviews you did with the Museum in the early 1990s, what I found really interesting was the way in which you spoke about the fact that you had always loved camping. You had loved being out in the bush and that in a lot of ways it represented real freedom for you. Do you still have that feeling about being out there or has freedom become the last thing you would associate with being out there camping and in the bush?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: It’s kind of odd. Rick and I went camping some three weeks ago. We had our tent with us. You could hear these noises in the dark and I said to Rick, ‘There’s something coming up to us.’ We turned the light on and there were about 60 cows. It was like, ‘I don’t know that I want to be in the tent.’ Looking around Rick said, ‘I don’t think we will pitch the tent tonight,’ because he is not over-enamoured with some of Australia’s creepy crawlies, while I on the other hand don’t like the cougars and bears in America.

SOPHIE JENSEN: There is give and take in every relationship.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Yes. I still like camping. But camping on my own … I have discovered that I am not happy just to put my sleeping bag down on the ground and go to sleep like I used to be. I feel like I want a shell around me. It has ruined it a bit for me. Daytime is fine and I still love sleeping out, but there is a slight edge there.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Especially if you were doing it with little children as well?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: They are not little any more now.

SOPHIE JENSEN: No, they are all growing up and marrying. One of the things you were criticised for very early on was having a baby out in the bush – that she was so young to be out or that she wasn’t wearing a sun bonnet. The criticism started very early that you shouldn’t have had a baby there in the first place. Did you find that remarkable?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I thought it was a bit stupid. We had come from a hot area to a cold area and we were wearing jackets, but people from Sydney and Melbourne were telling us that we should have sun bonnets and protection. We are thinking, ‘Why? It’s cold.’ That was one of the problems: people all looked at it from their own perspective. It didn’t matter what you did.

For instance, I got a lot of criticism for what I wore. The people in Darwin and Alice Springs thought I was overdressed and would say, ‘Fancy wearing all those fancy clothes’. From the southern states it was, ‘Well this is a bit disrespectful. She is wearing sundresses to court.’ It didn’t matter what you did, you were wrong. I had a lady in Sydney send me material on how to dress for court and I was supposed to have light wool suits. I thought, ‘You try it’. You are sitting in 36 degrees and she wants you to wear light wool. People who criticised what I was wearing on the television would see me in the same dress in real life and say, ‘That’s nice. Why didn’t you wear that?’ I was with my Mum one day when that happened and I said to Mum afterwards, ‘She was one of the people who was really criticising and that dress in particular.’ It shows you have to be there to look at it.

SOPHIE JENSEN: And that people are prepared to say something about anything. When you look at the summing up of coroner Denis Barritt who was the coroner in the first inquest which found that a dingo had taken Azaria and which cleared you of any responsibility, he said, ‘You have not only suffered the loss of your beloved child in the most tragic of circumstances but you have also been subjected to months of innuendo, suspicion and probably the most malicious gossip ever witnessed in this country.’ That was in February 1981 only six months after Azaria was taken.

Do you think he could possibly have imagined that right up today people are still gossiping and commenting? As recently as 2005 in a radio interview, Marshall Perron was speaking about the case in 2005, still saying on radio he was unsure of what happened and whether you were really innocent. From 1981 to 2005 I don’t imagine anyone could have anticipated the level of gossip?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Just as well we can’t see the future, isn’t it? You would not go through it if you had to take more than a few minutes at a time.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Coroner Dennis Barritt was highly critical of the Northern Territory police and their forensic investigation in his summing up. At that moment one of the readings of your case was that it is not so much the Crown versus Lindy Chamberlain as the Northern Territory versus Lindy Chamberlain. Do you think that at that point the Northern Territory became a part?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: How about if we just say ‘certain people in the Northern Territory’? I know this is being recorded so I will try to hold my tongue here. Let me just say this: at the time this happened we were totally unaware that the runway for Yulara was finished. We didn’t even know that the development was going ahead – I think most Australians didn’t. I know a certain bank had $20 million already in the project. There was lots of private money from people in the Northern Territory in that resort. It is so well buried in corporations, trusts or whatever that we couldn’t find out who those people were. I do know there were not much more than a dozen families with money in the Northern Territory at the time, so those people were terrified that it was going to ruin that whole project.

The final papers were to be signed that week, although we didn’t find that out until a few years ago. They had had trouble before but they had managed to keep it quiet. One thing that never came out was that a Russian diplomat had been bitten by a dingo on the rear end and they thought there was going to be an international incident. That’s what stopped the dingoes being fed, and it had been just long enough for them to get hungry. They were telling all the bus tours; they weren’t telling the private people and they were the ones that were camping with families like us.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is true that Derek Roff, who was the senior ranger, had been writing to the government for some years warning them that an incident might occur because the dingoes were becoming a problem?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I don’t know whether he had written for some years but I know at least two pieces of correspondence had gone on. He had written to the conservation committee which comprised six people, including Ian Barker and Paul Everingham, asking permission because they said, ‘There will be some definite harm and maybe a child or possibly a baby will be killed if we don’t do something.’ That was less than a month before. They wrote back and said no.

We didn’t know at the time there was also a case that they knew about that set a precedent, which they were terrified we would find out about. I think the mini-series Through My Eyes – which is not through my eyes, by the way – found out about it accidentally. Everything the police say to one another is straight off police transcripts; it is not written by a script writer. Almost 50 per cent of that is straight off scripts where [the police] have taped themselves. That gives you an idea of the things they were saying and thinking behind the scenes.

The initial policeman that came and interviewed us was told he didn’t have the result they wanted. He came in one day and his junior was sitting at his desk going through his papers with his feet up on the desk. His junior said to him, ‘What do you want? You’re off the case. It’s mine now.’ They got somebody in there who would do what they wanted to do, because they were terrified that they would be held accountable because of this precedent case and because they had refused to do what needed to be done with the troublesome dingoes. Dingoes were literally coming in to motel dining rooms and jumping up and walking down the middle of the dining room tables in front of guests, taking food off the tables and going. But the public were not being told because it was nice tourist attraction – ‘Look there’s a wild animal in front of you.’

SOPHIE JENSEN: There is a sense, too, in some of the things you have written that people didn’t want the dingo to be guilty; they didn’t want to think ill of one of our animals.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: One of our native animals. We have a few natives that are a bit nasty around here – snakes and crocodiles. It’s not a matter of blaming the animal; it’s a matter of letting people know that they are dangerous and you should take precautions. If you don’t know they are dangerous you are lulled into a false sense of security.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Within the Eternity gallery we have a small area where people are able to record a one-minute story about themselves or their own lives. In 2001 when Clinton Gage was a nine-year-old who was mauled by dingoes on Fraser Island and killed, a number of stories were recorded in the gallery at that time, of people essentially apologising to you saying, ‘I just had no idea and never believed that a dingo would do that’ or ‘could kill’ and this kind of thing. It was a time where people reassessed their evaluations of their own judgements that they had made about you. Did you have people writing to you about that particular incident as well?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Yes, that one and subsequent ones. There was the little girl at Geelong at the parents’ farm at Christmas a couple of years ago with a dingo cross, which was a farm working dog and tied up, and she got too close. What makes us say that a wild animal won’t do something like that, when over and over again we hear stories of family pets attacking. A number of people wrote in to me telling me stories of – one was a grandmother and one was a mother – where they had lost their own child, and one of them was to a terrier they had owned for about seven years and had been fine with the first baby. I guess it got jealous with the next one.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It’s a remarkable thing. Just changing tack slightly, when you read about your case one of the things that can horrify you most is about justice and the jury system, because it does make you think. You do try to imagine what if it were me or what if I was sitting there? There was an interview where one of the jury members in your trial said during the media interview, ‘The jury system we currently have has to be the best in the world because everybody has the opportunity to have their innocence proved,’ which horrifies you. Then another member of the jury is also said to have boasted to his neighbours that he was glad he was on the jury so that he could get the bitch. He also was reported to have said that to police quite openly. Do you think there was ever a chance in your case of the jury system working, of finding people that had not been saturated -

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: There was a cartoon out that appealed to me that I saw, which was two big burly Northern Territory policemen and a swaggie in the middle of the desert saying, ‘Lindy who?’ and underneath it had, ‘Eleven more to go’. I felt that, ‘Yes, that is just about it too.’ I have heard from friends that the Northern Territory still do filter their programs up there. If something about the Northern Territory came on 60 Minutes down here it would not appear in the Territory so that the people didn’t know. They would either do a rerun or put a different story in; it just didn’t appear. So information that the south was getting, the north didn’t get. So it went by word of mouth.

When you have one out of every three people in the city of Darwin depending on the government for their pay packet – if you weren’t in a government job, you were married to somebody that was in a government job or related to someone in a government job or you were their next-door neighbour. Darwin has grown a bit more since then, but that was the situation. So if you went against the government you were literally out of a job. So you were either working in the government, in the police force or in the prison force. It made things really difficult.

One of the prison officers had a son who was a policeman, and every now and then she would sneak around and say, ‘Don’t tell anyone I told you but …’ and ‘I will get into real trouble if I let you know, but this is what is happening behind the scenes and you might want a bit of a heads up.’ I always knew what their answers were going to be months before they gave them. People down here would get all excited that maybe she’s coming home. But they’d say, ‘No, the more they would push us to do something, the more we will dig our heels in because we’re not going to be told by them down there what we do up here.’ It was pretty much the southerners against us.

So you have the Northern Territory wanting statehood with some 300,000 people in it at the time, and they wanted the same rights as the states of New South Wales or Victoria. I don’t think they went about the right way of doing it because what they did proved they weren’t grown-up enough to have that statehood.

I know Coroner Barritt was given the cold shoulder after that. He got no more promotions. A lot of his peers would not speak to him. He said what he did about the forensics, not because of our case but because our case was just one more. He was so frustrated about the sloppy forensic work that was done up there in the Territory; he hoped this had enough national pressure to get a proper forensic [scientist] in the Northern Territory and that it would benefit them. But they dug their toes in to go the opposite way around.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is a frightening thing when you read through your story, because people still have that sense that science will give us the truth in a case; the forensic science will sort this out. When you hear that DNA evidence was found at the scene of a case, immediately you think, ‘Oh well, that is sorted.’ People still have a lot of faith in forensic science to sort it, yet your own experience is one that must make you shudder when you see things like CSI and this kind of thing, because they are all still people?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: It is one of my favourite programs. Interestingly enough I had always been fascinated with forensics and police work. But you do see programs like CSI and think, ‘You do it like that’ and it all fits into place. Maybe that is one of our problems because we tend to see real-life events in a one-hour TV program. You get the problem and then within the hour you get the solution and can sit back and say it is done. Real life is not like that. Sometimes you have to wait a tremendous amount of years, and often people are dead before something comes up again.

When that Erin Horsburgh came forward and said she was Azaria and was going on about DNA tests to prove it I got some very irate letters saying, ‘Why don’t you have DNA tests?’ We did DNA tests. In fact, don’t quote me on this but I think it may have been the first case in Australia where DNA was actually used in court. It was in the very early days anyway. Two of the men in our case were ones that were in the forefront of that in Australia. At that particular time everybody wanted me to do an interview and I thought, ‘All right I am getting enough hassle here now to open my mouth again,’ so I rang one of them and said, ‘Look, I know we had DNA tests but just give me a little more information so that I know what I am talking about here because I know it is not open and shut like this.’

They were going to do DNA tests on Azaria’s clothes and find out if there was dingo DNA on there and they had said, ‘No, it is not worth it.’ At the time I had said ‘Why not? That proves it.’ They said, ‘No, it doesn’t.’ Well, why doesn’t it? They told me, ‘Just because DNA is on there doesn’t mean it takes you any further, because anyone or any thing that has come into contact with those clothes will have DNA on it.’ For instance, if you prove there is DNA and then the Crown turns around and says, ‘Yes that is because they are outside and a dingo walked past a week later. That is how it is on there.’ So it doesn’t advance you anywhere.

By the way, when you talked about jurors saying you can prove your innocence, you are not supposed to have to in Australia – but we did. That is the French system. We forget that as Australians a person is innocent until they are proven guilty.

So I thought I will get some more information about DNA. He said to me, ‘I will give you an illustration. It is very simple. At one stage we wanted to see if we could get Tasmanian tiger DNA to study them a little bit further. There is a pelt in one of the museums in Tasmania which they were given access to. They did 100 DNA tests and not one came back as tiger DNA. They were all human DNA out of 100 tests. You could get lucky and it could be your second test or it could have been the 101st test.’ That gives you an illustration of just what it was like. This was people brushing it, walking past or whatever. Just because you have the item doesn’t mean you are going to get the answer that is the right one. So it is very tricky.

Even when you take a test, there is no give or take in a test – I am talking generally here not just about a DNA test – there is still error of the operator and there is still personal interpretation. When you get tests like Joy Kuhl did, which were done without proper controls, without the proper mixture and without experience enough to know what she was actually doing, she sat in front of the jury and talked to them like children. The juror that has come out and spoken has said, ‘She just talked to us and explained it right the way through and we understood it. She drew pictures and we knew what she was talking about. The other men used all these long words and we didn’t have a clue.’ What did she do? She cut out what the local paper had put in it, which was police dictated, and that became her ‘what happened that day’ It was literally newspapers stuck into her scrapbook.

So when you say you have a jury of your peers, no, you don’t because those people would have had to be experts. This was the first case in Australia that relied heavily on forensics and it had more experts that usual anyway. You would have had to have doctorates in 15 or more fields to begin to understand the forensics without going into the eyewitnesses or anything else.

A trick was used which is perfectly legal. We look at our system and say, ‘This is great. We are going to get a fair trial.’ But no, you are not because there are so many loopholes and twists within the system. The trick was they put all the eyewitnesses on during the first day and a half and then spent six weeks on forensic evidence. By the time you are confused with that, you have forgotten what the eyewitnesses have said. It gets buried.

They did things like saying, ‘We won’t bring the Aboriginals up here because you have to get permission for the women to talk away from their tribal grounds and you have to have the right interpreter because they should talk through a man. Unless the tribal council gives them permission to talk, they will sit there and tell you whatever and they will be very hostile, because they are not supposed to be doing it culturally.’ So they said, ‘We are not going to call them in.’ You get all those sorts of things. They said, ‘If you call them, we’re going to point out the fact that they will turn up, and he’d been drinking the night before with his mates so we will say, “He’s too drunk to know what he’s talking about. We will belittle them.”’ So we said, ‘All right, we are not going to call them because that is not fair to call someone who you know is deliberately going to be belittled.’ One interesting thing about tribal Aboriginals is that they don’t lie. It’s the mixing in with whites that make them like that. So if they say a certain thing happened, they don’t expect to be questioned on that. That’s what happened and that’s all there is to it.

So they tendered all the Aboriginal evidence of following the tracks, seeing where she was put down, knowing which dingo it was, where it went and everything else and said to the jury, ‘Here’s this’. I talked to them afterwards and they said, ‘Oh yes, but we didn’t think we were allowed to read that.’ It was very clear in court that they said, ‘There’s that. You can read it at your leisure.’ But when you are in court and you are given a 15-minute break, your mind is whizzing and you are glad for the break. When were these people going to have time to read all this paper? That is a whole swathe of evidence that you don’t get, because that’s the legal way to do it in court.

Of course, if you don’t hear the evidence in open court the reporters don’t report on it and you as public never hear it. You hear weeks and weeks of all this terrible forensic material but you don’t know the way the system works, so you are looking at a case saying, ‘There must be something terribly thing with this. There is some huge mystery here,’ when there is no mystery at all, other than the fact as to why people wanted to twist it around.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It dominated the case in the end, didn’t it? There are people who are still unaware there were people at the camp site who from day one supported your version of events and who never questioned that a dingo had taken Azaria, and that was the whole camp site. Everyone at the camp site agreed with you and supported you right throughout this entire process. I think people sometimes don’t even realise that such people existed, because what they remember is the arterial spray, the supposed bloody handprint on the back of the jumpsuit that turned out to be sand, and that a dingo can’t slice a jumpsuit this way. They were the elements that people took up and remembered. They forget the people, which is really interesting about the way that people remember the case now.

It is also that thing about interpretation. I think it was Errol Simper who covered the case for the Australian and he was initially convinced of your guilt largely on the basis of the forensic evidence. But then he said, ‘The forensic evidence was so strong it made me realise later that experts are very equivocal people. They can have all the letters after their names but, at the end of the day, the expert who is guaranteed not to be wrong has yet to be born.’ It is lovely to read these things again in hindsight.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: It is nice, especially seeing he had a habit of turning the chair in front of him around, putting his feet up on it and going to sleep. One of the judges did a similar thing and the inquest just went on in front of him while he slept. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

SOPHIE JENSEN: It is horrific. One of the things that you wonder about is how on earth you survived it all. I look at the ‘bad taste’ T-shirts in the collection now and I know they were on sale in the laneway right next to the site of the royal commission.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Right next to the door. People were wearing them at the door that you walked in and out of.

SOPHIE JENSEN: Every day you walked past those being sold or worn. I wonder how on earth you didn’t just scream in anger and attack them.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I think I wore my teeth down a bit grinding them.

SOPHIE JENSEN: A question that people are interested in is: how do you think you managed to survive it? You became an incredibly tough person; you gave this incredible persona of being someone that would be able to cope with it all. Looking at it now, do you think ‘how did I do it’ or do you know how you made it through?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I guess I know how I made it through, it was God’s help basically. I always thought to myself – minister’s wife or not – if anything happened to my children that would be it, God is out the door, forget him, because he should have looked after my kids. I just knew within seconds, ‘I have to rely on God here. He’s got to help me through this because I can’t do it on my own.’ It was just overwhelming that it was that or suicide basically on the spot. Many is the time when I have said …

SOPHIE JENSEN: It’s a good thing to be able to talk about the faith thing but it’s a really hard one because it is the most personal element in terms of talking about losing your child and how you did it. Everyone here thinks that you have been very brave talking about that to this point.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I have literally had to say, ‘Help me get through this 30 seconds’ and then pray again for the next 30 seconds. There were some days when that was the only way I could get through it, particularly one patch in prison after the failure of the High Court. You know the evidence is there; you know they are refusing to look at it; you know you have kids that need you; yet your hands are tied – you can’t do anything. A lot of people were praying for me. You could feel those prayers too, and that helped me get through it. But you can’t just rely on other people; you have to rely on your own prayers and your own walk with God.

It’s a day-to-day thing. You don’t just develop it when something awful happens. You can say, ‘I haven’t got a bad temper. I know how to hold my temper.’ If you can still hold your temper when somebody is jumping up and down on your foot and laughing at you and you can still hold your temper, then you can say, ‘I can hold my temper.’ It comes with practice in the little things. I think faith and trust in God is the same thing: it starts with the little things and it works up.

This case to me has been a bit like eating an elephant. If somebody said to me, ‘You have to eat an elephant,’ and served a whole elephant on the table on my plate – apart from the fact that I am a vegetarian – I’d say ‘forget it’. But one meal at the time, one bite at a time, you can eventually eat an elephant – and that’s how this case was. I am glad that we are unable to see into the future to see what happens and what is coming, because I don’t think you would get through it. But if you can do it one step at a time, then you can go through it.

SOPHIE JENSEN: I am aware there will be some people that would like to ask you some questions, Lindy. One of the questions that fascinates me is the fact that it is 27 years ago this year that Azaria was taken, yet one advertisement was all it took in a paper to sell out two sessions of a talk with you, which is lovely because it must make you feel still popular. It’s something for people to think about: why does this case still have this hold, this fascination, over people; why are they still interested?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: How about they tell me?

SOPHIE JENSEN: That’s what I was going to say. To start off the questions from the floor I would be really interested to hear if anyone in the audience has an idea as to why they think it still is a fascinating thing today, and what this case has for Australians and Australia that makes it something that is still discussed and analysed to the extent that it is.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: If someone has an answer to this, I am interested.

SOPHIE JENSEN: If anyone has an answer for that one, I would love to hear it.

QUESTION: Hello Lindy, my name is Jane Barnett. I am the mother of three boys and I do a lot of work with young children. I am also a maternal and child health nurse who talks to parents about children’s safety, which is one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing. I even talk to parents about magpies swooping their children. As parents we are constantly interested in how wild animals, the animals around us, impact on our children. I think it’s very relevant because of the animals we have in Australia coming face to face with us, who are used to living in a urban, safe environment. I think it will always hold fascination for parents who take their children out to the national parks. I think that will always be interesting.

SOPHIE JENSEN: I believe you still receive letters from parents who – their baby turns nine and a half weeks – and all of a sudden it hits them that could be my baby?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Yes, there is that. I think it happened to you.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It did.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I have a lot of letters like that. It is interesting in saying that about looking after your children. The night before we had been in an area out by ourselves where we had camped out. We had slept the children in the car so that they were away from ants and snakes – never even thought of dingoes. But when you get to a camping area and you are supposed to be safe – we thought a tent was safe. You can’t be too careful; you simply don’t know.

QUESTION: We went on a family holiday through Central Australia and we just had the normal tent in a camping area and often we would sleep on the ground in a tent. We woke up at Kings Canyon one morning and there were dingo tracks all around where we as children were sleeping. So we never doubted that there were dingoes out there impacting on families and coming up quite close to people, because it could have been us. There was a sense of that could have been us.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Certainly I have had letters from people on stations from the early days – men and women aged 80 and over – about experiences from when they were small and they were not happy stories. Why they have been buried in Australian history, I don’t know.

QUESTION: Lindy, my name is Shirley Sutton. The reason I am here today is it is very different when you live so far away from something so tragic that happened for you and your family, and I wanted to come today because it brings it home in a very real way just what the difficulties were for you. Unless you hear that story, it’s fine reading things in the paper and listening to the news, but you don’t know what you are hearing is the truth. I believed from the very moment that accident happened that it was a dingo who took Azaria. So in my small way I believed in God that he would give you the help that would get you through. One thing I want to ask: were you ever given the opportunity to grieve for your baby? Because with all that going on, it must have been enormous.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I find it interesting when people say, ‘Are you ever given the opportunity to grieve,’ because it makes me think that people say, ‘All right now it is time to grieve. Go and sit over there and grieve.’ Grief is not like that. Whether you are given the opportunity or not or whether that process is skewed by other events, you still grieve. You might go through it quicker or you might go through it over a longer period because of it, but you still grieve. You can’t do a person out of that grieving process. It is very different for every person. We often hear about the steps of grief – you go through, this and then this. Even though that has gained a lot of popularity, the experts realise that is not really true. Some people may only go two or three of those steps. Others might go through those and half a dozen others, and they are in no particular order. Sometimes it takes years and sometimes it takes a very short time.

Grief is not just related to loss of a loved one. It can happen from the loss of a job. It can happen moving from one town to another. It can happen from loss of a pet. A simple definition of ‘grief’ is a change in expectations which causes us some form of trauma. We often tend to think that one person feels grief because you can see them sitting crying in a corner, whereas the person standing with a straight back and dry eyes staring out the window doesn’t care. That is not true. The person that is standing staring out the window could have a much deeper grief than the one who is crying and it may be more long-lasting. Most people, even those who appear to have a stiff upper lip, at some stages have their times of crying or whatever it is that they do for their own grief. Because we are all different personalities and we all face grief a different way, you don’t know how you are going to face grief. Even though you think you know yourself, you do not know how you are going to react until it happens to you. You are not necessarily going to react the same way if it happens to you twice. Both experiences could be different.

One of the worst things is when we look at a person and we say, ‘I wouldn’t react that way, therefore they are wrong and they are not acting normal.’ That is something that the press likes to tell you and you like to jump into those situations. But what is normal? Who knows what normal is. What is normal for you is not normal to somebody else, because we all live life so very differently. Even though you may have been married to somebody for 30 years, it doesn’t matter. More than likely you are going to go through grief very differently and not necessarily be able to help the other person go through it. It is no good getting cross and saying, ‘You just do it this way.’ It doesn’t happen that way.

As the public we have to be extremely careful. It is very nice for people to say, ‘Such and such happened and I knew by looking at you that you couldn’t do it,’ or ‘Look at the bitch, she’s really hard faced. Everybody knows she did it.’ It doesn’t work that way either. You can’t go on looks. As much as one way seems nasty and the other nice, both are equally naive positions. You need to keep an open mind unless you have been there and have seen what happened and have looked at all the evidence. There were people reading the evidence in our case very accurately, because they didn’t look at the screaming headlines and jump to a conclusion. I think in modern society most of us get our exercise jumping to conclusion rather than in the gym.

If you look at all news – different magazines, online, television, and radio – you will find there are a lot of facts in the same story that will change. He was 26, he was 21, he was 32, he was 17 – who knows how old he was. The only thing is the reference to ‘he’, so it’s a male and that much you know. Then you go on to have a look at the next sentence. In all those stories there will be one or two facts that are the same. That is the fact that you can believe; the rest is just filling.

We tend to forget that the news is a business like anything else, and you have sell your product. If you don’t like what you are getting, it’s your fault because you are subscribing to the product. If a sitcom comes on, it’s not funny and you don’t watch it, it disappears in a hurry. If there is a type of news that comes on and you feel it is not accurate and you’re not getting the right thing, if you don’t go on to that channel it will change and it will become what the public wants, or it will disappear.

So it is no good grumbling, ‘Look what we are getting now. We are getting all this terrible stuff and we are hearing nothing but crime and murder,’ that is what you are asking for so that is what is being produced. As hard as that fact might sound, that is what happens. I know when Rupert Murdoch took over in Australia he would walk through the newsroom and say, ‘Change that headline to this,’ and in our case it was still in the days of where they used the online news service. So you could send a photo through the wire, and the more times you sent it through, the more it accentuated shadows and lightened the light patches. So it didn’t matter who it was, you could make them look like a murderer with the number of times you were sending it through. I have seen photographs of myself that I haven’t even recognised but it says underneath that it is me so presumably at some stage it was.

Another thing was swinging reporters. They were paid to serialise the news: to make me look guilty one day and innocent the next so that you would buy the next issue, the next magazine. That has become so much a part of the news these days that I think we are barely aware that it happens. But you can get anyone to look like anything. Every time I cried it got edited out because they said the public would be irate at them if they put it on. When it came to the royal commission, it was all right to show me as human so all of a sudden you started seeing that back footage. You started seeing smiling photographs or whatever. Before that if I smiled, I was uncaring; if I cried I was acting.

Just one little story that might interest you: when the inquest went to Ayers Rock and they were going to have a view, there are some news crews who were very good and they would say, ‘Okay, between this point and this point you are ours. Out of that we won’t hassle you. As long as you walk from there to there and we get our daily picture, you are okay. The rest of the time you are off limits.’ There were others who would be waiting at your door to go ‘click’ the minute you walked out. I know there were four-inch headlines at one stage: ‘Lindy answers the door in bare feet’. Where is the news in that? Who cares! Right down at the bottom after a full front page it said, ‘Lindy refused to be interviewed.’ But they had a full story and they had an exclusive because I said, ‘No, I wouldn’t talk to them.’ That is all you have to do for an exclusive interview.

When it got to Ayers Rock, we had all driven four hours, we were having lunch and were starting at 1 o’clock. There are picnic tables at Ayers Rock in one particular area and we were all sitting around having lunch. A number of reporters said, ‘Look if the guys from so and so come, get ready to go because they just don’t play by the rules.’ We had almost finished lunch and one of them said, ‘Here comes so and so, get out of here.’ We were with our lawyers and driver and we just threw everything together. We literally grabbed the corners of the tablecloth and threw it all in the car. We were pulling out as they arrived. The headlines were, ‘Lindy picnics at her daughter’s death site’ or something or other because these guys had seen us. So people think, ‘How could you do that, fancy having a picnic there? I wouldn’t do that.’ But you don’t know the story behind it. All you see is the headlines.

They wanted something that night at what they called the re-enactment, which was no re-enactment. Everybody was sitting around to see whether or not you could read by the light, because we had said you could read by the light. Then they said, ‘We went back and you couldn’t see.’ If I went there now after having that light shining in my eyes and giving me spots for the last half hour, I would walk into that light and wouldn’t be able to see a thing, which is what some of the police did. They came from lighted hotels straight in to the darkness. We, on the other hand, had been there for three hours. Our eyes had adjusted and we could see quite well.

First of all they stood in a circle around poor Coroner Barritt. The minute he went to open his mouth – they have big aircraft landing lights on the top of their cameras to make it light enough to view at night and they all turned them on. They were all in a circle so they were facing one another and nobody got any pictures. Coroner Barritt couldn’t see and said, ‘Now I can’t see a thing.’ Then we had to wait another half hour and it was quite obvious reporters were wandering around taking notes. We said, ‘Look, ask the guys to read their notes back, that will tell you whether they can see or not.’ They said ‘Oh yes’, and they were reading them back. After the first inquest they refused to do that so there was great debate as to whether it was dark enough or light enough or whatever.

But during that time what they called the barbecue were just gas bottles where you could cook your food. It was not a barbecue party like a lot of people concluded. There was also a low, flat, long open fire with concrete across the top that was about six feet long. They were all milling around waiting for a chance to get this big expose photo. There were four photographers in a row. One of them went to step back and stepped into the guy behind him who lost his balance, and he knocked the next one who knocked the next one who almost fell full-length along the barbecue.

Our local pastor was there, he’s an ex-New Guinea missionary. It is all very solemn and everybody is a bit tense, and when you are tense you have a tendency to get the giggles or something like that. He just said very drolly, ‘Nearly had long pig’, which is what the New Guinea headhunters called white men when they eat them. I knew that and I immediately burst out laughing. I saw the cameras go up but I was quicker and put my hand up like that. I knew I couldn’t have a picture in the paper of me laughing. When I got home there was a full front-page picture with the title: ‘Lindy’s agony’. They had got this shot and it looked like I was crying, except my mother had realised and said she’s laughing. I came home and told them the story, and they were right. That is how you can skew anything to go with what you want. They wanted the sad picture, it made me laugh and did the same thing.

QUESTION: I recently read Joanne Lees’ book about her experiences in the Northern Territory. In reading that it struck me that the way she was blamed for her boyfriend Peter Falconio’s death had so many parallels with the way the Northern Territory justice system didn’t work and should have worked -

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Same people working on it.

QUESTION: That was going to be my question: did you follow that case and did that bring back all the awful things that happened to you over that time?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: You probably tend not to follow some of those cases as much as you should. But with some of the evidence – and I get told of behind the scenes stuff too because of who I am and people think I will be interested in it, which I am, so I hear some things that you don’t even hear – it was fairly clear early on when you were watching the news that Joanne Lees was not involved. That was even looking at her reactions but, more than that, looking at the reactions of those who found her that night, the truck driver and the hotel people. If you looked at the evidence and know how people look, you could tell that she was in shock. It’s not so easy to fake that type of shock.

You can look at something like that and say, ‘Anything that comes from here on is going to be blown up’. Then when I looked and saw some of the people involved opening their mouths I went, ‘Here we go again’. And then you switch off because it makes you angry to see people who should be out testing boot polish or something still playing with people’s lives.

We have no system in place in Australia for people who consistently do things the wrong way. I am not talking about a genuine mistake or somebody that is willing to say, ‘Yes, I made a mistake here’, but someone who consistently does things wrong and maintains, come hell or high water that they are right, even when they have been proved wrong – then I think those people should lose their credentials. There is some move in Australia to have a governing body in this type of scientific work.

I would like to see a panel of experts who go over forensic evidence first so that instead of the Crown and the defence having both their experts and the person who is not an expert trying to work out who is telling the truth, have that evidence go before a panel who listens to it all and says, ‘Scientifically this is the only view that can be accepted here,’ and that is the one thing that goes in front of the jury. If that happened then we would begin to get some form of fairness within our courts.

I can certainly see there is a case for having the three to five judges without a jury like they have in Europe. When you sit there day after day, you get to know what’s a scam and what’s just put across. You get people like [barrister assisting the coroner] Des Sturgess in our case who said to his witnesses, ‘When I signal like this, you stop not mid-paragraph, not mid-sentence but mid-word, shut up.’ That’s how you stop them from saying the other half of the sentence that would have helped the defence. That sort of thing is legal. But it is not moral and it’s not right. That is how our system works.

You get up and take the oath, ‘I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,’ but it’s a load of rubbish. You are only allowed to say what they let you say. You try and get anything in at the end, unless you have the knowledge that you can turn around and say to the judge, ‘Your Honour, I have something I would like to add and make a statement,’ you are not going to get the chance. And even then often they will say, ‘Hang on, the other lawyer is to come and I am sure he will lead you through.’ But he may not have had access to you and he may not know what you know – as was the case with Murray Haby, the school headmaster and Queen’s Scout who tracked the dingo. He had seen the spots of blood and he had seen where Azaria had been put down -[ and he had told them that. But they didn’t hand anything on to us. We didn’t know of his existence.

When he was in court my lawyers said to me, ‘Lindy, who is this guy?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I have never heard of him.’ They said, ‘Are you sure you have never heard of him?’ and I replied, ‘No, no one I have met. I am sure.’ Well, he turned out to be the people we were looking for that had come from the next caravan along and that I shouted out to. I had no idea what he had done after that. I just knew that he was probably the third or fourth person to go and search that night. He sat there in the court like this and, if anybody ever looked guilty of lying, he did. I just sat there and watched him and thought: ‘I hope he feels my eyes on him and he feels uncomfortable.’

Then right near the end he turned around and looked up at me and just stared at me. I thought: ‘You look at me because you are lying, and I hope you feel uncomfortable.’ Then the Crown made one mistake when he said, ‘Anything else?’ And up came his head and he said, ‘Yes, I found the dingo tracks with blood beside them and where the baby had been put down.’ You could have heard a pin drop. It was phenomenal. I stared at him. I looked at my lawyers. Our lawyers looked at me and I signalled that I didn’t know anything about it. They immediately asked to adjourn for a moment. Our lawyers came out and said, ‘I can’t believe that they have sat on this and not told us.’

We would never have known except the Crown’s guy had said, ‘Anything else?’ In the corridor outside you hear Ian Barker saying to his junior, ‘What the dot dot dot. Who needs the defence when you are working for them on our side.’ I think God made that slip-up so that he could get it in. From talking to Murray later, and we have got to know him since that time, he said he was so uncomfortable because he was trying to work out where he could get that in, even though they had specifically told him: ‘Do not say that. We are not interested in the dingo, we don’t want to hear about it, keep your mouth shut.’ But we had seen this signal going on. It wasn’t until one of the people came and told us what it meant, and then we knew to mark down in the question where he did that so that we knew to ask, ‘Was there anything else on that subject?’ to get the other half of it. I think it’s a game.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It’s a pretty horrible game. We are running a bit over. I think there is time for one last question.

QUESTION: Lindy, on the morning after Azaria was taken I was staying with a sister of mine who is one of your mob actually – she’s Seventh Day Adventist. Let me say from the outset that I have the utmost respect for the Seventh Day Adventists. I had had experience with dingoes. I worked in the Channel country in Queensland. A lady up the back said about seeing tracks around the tent. I have certainly had the experience of waking up and seeing dingo tracks around my swag.

But I was skeptical of your claim. I was also involved with the Queensland police. I had worked on the periphery of a number of homicide investigations. When my sister told me that a child had been taken by a dingo at Ayers Rock I said, ‘I would be having a pretty close look at that if I were the investigating officers.’ However, on the news that night I learnt that the dingoes there were semi-domesticated and later on I was to read Derek Roff’s comments when he asked for permission to shoot some of the dingoes because he did say he feared for the life of a small child or baby. I looked more closely into it and followed the newspapers. I found that [journalist] Malcolm Brown seemed to be the only person who recorded it accurately from my understanding.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: There was him and also Kim Tilbrook from Adelaide.

QUESTION: I became quite convinced of your innocence. People were saying, ‘Look it is only circumstantial evidence,’ but it wasn’t even circumstantial evidence. All the evidence indicated your innocence.

On one Saturday some time after your incarceration I went to the first public meeting in Queensland in relation to the finding of your guilt. I didn’t go there intending to talk. Most of the people who did speak were speaking about the history of dingoes having attacked children, so I thought there was enough of that. I got up and spoke about the lack of continuity of possession of exhibits that Joy Kuhl was responsible for. Joy Kuhl was a professional witness, but I seemed to recall she destroyed some of the slides on which her tests were made.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: How about she destroyed the lot.

QUESTION: Did she destroy the lot? I think she used the o-toluidine method.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Yes.

QUESTION: Lindy, thank you very much for the privilege of listening to you here today and for the honour of being able to actually speak to you. It is so marvellous. I am one of the many mothers who had … at the same time. I identified with you. I felt the injustices with you, the powerlessness and the joys when you were released.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Thank you.

QUESTION: You are an incredibly strong woman. I am impressed with your lack of bitterness and your ability to laugh at the tremendous injustice. I am so ashamed to have been Australian at that period of time. I think if anyone deserves an apology from the government, it is you.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: I would like to hear one from the government. They tell me if I want an apology I have to ask for one, and I maintain it’s never an apology if you have to ask for it. A true apology is voluntary.

QUESTION: What’s happening in your life now? We have read your autobiography; we have lived your life through identifying with you. Can you give us some positive feedback for the future now and that everything has worked out? We need a happily ever after.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: Who knows about the happily ever after – life changes from day to day and let’s hope it doesn’t have too many more kicks. Last year Rick and I finally got to the position where we had a full-time income for the first time since 1980. We have been through some really rough times. People look at you and say, ‘You are on the television so you have to be rich and you have to be famous.’ You don’t have to be either. I have seen some very famous actresses wait until everybody has left some important event that they like me have borrowed the clothes for – they wait until right at the end so nobody sees they are travelling in a little beat-up Morris or something like that. You don’t necessarily have to be rich, although some of them are lucky that they are.

It’s been really difficult getting work. When I married Rick he was working at the time and we didn’t think there would be any problem. But within a few months of our engagement he lost his job because his boss couldn’t handle the media attention on his workplace because Rick was there. From then on it was like ‘nobody wants to employ you’. Rick has had jobs that he has applied for and they have said, ‘Yes we would like to have you. You have all the qualifications, but we know you don’t have to work so we will give you $10 an hour so you can say you are working. It’s nice of you to volunteer.’ You can guess what he said to them. They think you live on thin air or something or other. So we have had to create our own job.

I was sitting on the bed last night trying to get the paint out from underneath my toenails so it wouldn’t show today because we renovate for a living. Rick does anything with saws, hammers and plumbing tools. We usually manage to twist Aidan’s arm, because he’s an electrician, to get him to do the electrical work. Rick can, and you are allowed to in America, but you are not allowed to here so if Rick does anything we have to get Aidan to come and look over it later. I do the painting, the interior decorating and the landscaping. Rick was hoping to be here today, but the carport got sent up too late. He is spending today finishing that off before he flies down and starts work on his other job on Tuesday.

QUESTION: You are living in Australia now. I thought you were living in America?

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: We have been back for about eight years. We live in the Hunter Valley but we have been living in South Hedland which has been about 39 degrees so it’s been fairly cool for up there yet. It’s a good place to renovate in the mining towns at the moment and that’s helped set us up. It has been very good but it’s been a lot of hard work. I am nearly 60 and sometimes think I am getting too old for this, but there were no workmen so we did it ourselves. Normally we would contract it out and just do the fun parts.

SOPHIE JENSEN: It’s a nice way to leave it in terms of life goes on. Lindy, I am sure that everyone would wish me to say thank you so much for sharing all of your stories with us today; not only being so open but also being so generous by having such a wonderful sense of humour about it all, which is startling and amazing to anyone that has read anything about your story. It’s a real privilege to have you here. Everyone is thrilled to have had this opportunity to finally meet the ‘Lindy’ that they have read so much about. Thank you very much for coming.

LINDY CHAMBERLAIN-CREIGHTON: The other one that is not in the news.

Disclaimer and Copyright notice

This is an edited transcript typed from an audio recording.

The National Museum of Australia cannot guarantee its complete accuracy.